I'm working on improving performance of a Joomla site. I noticed that the longest part of generating a page is JApplicationCms->getMenu(). The query returns 380 menu items, each of them with a larger than usually params column (some extension). JApplicationCms took 1.78s to execute, out of which 1.37s has been spent in 489 calls of Registry::bindData.

Essentially, for menu items, the flow is as following:

• JMenu loads data rows, params is a JSON string
• JRegistry loadString() converts this string to an object
• JRegistry bindData() converts that object to an array
• JRegistry bindData() creates a new object, iterates over the array and copies keys as object properties
• The newly created object is returned

I propose that for simple cases like loading a menu item, the flow looks like this:

• JMenu loads data rows, params is a JSON string
• JRegistry loadString() converts this string to an object
• The object is returned

After my changes, said site takes 0.21s to execute JApplicationCms->getMenu().