If it has to be updated on every page load I don't think there's anything you can do...I may be wrong I'm sure someone on HN will have some performance tricks.

If it has to be updated on every page load I don't think there's anything you can do...I may be wrong I'm sure someone on HN will have some performance tricks. You can generate your headers and footers and store them in a file instead of touching a database every time. If you're killing your database server you're probably returning too many records or your queries suck. I wouldn't know without seeing them.