Polish is a great example of this. It looks like someone just mashed on the keyboard. There is a Polish mma fighter named Joanna Jedrzejczyk and no one has any clue how to say her last name.
"Unless you’ve goofed something up, the slowest part of your PHP-based application should be PHP itself."
Is the database not the bottleneck? Especially with the way wordpress stores "post meta data" with key and value columns it seems that the joins could get a bit ugly.
how long are we talking?