I agree. There is a lot of non-technical musing floating about here. Thats not a bad thing except this is a site devoted to technical matters.
I can't say I'm bothered enough to really do anything about it though, maybe I haven't been here long enough to find it a problem.
Yes, articles are few and far between. However not everyone can post articles...
I'm not a PHP person and I don't know enough (or couldn't guess from your description) about your system to really say but here are a couple of thoughts.
It sounds like you might look into memoisation for your 'tags'. If these are functions that will be called multiple times with the same arguments then memoisation might give you a good boost. Not sure if there is a PHP module for this . Have a look here for a short definition - memo function
Basically a memo function is one where the system caches previous calls to the function. When the function is called the system checks to see if the function has already been called with these arguments and if so simply returns the cached result.
If you wanna have a chat e-mail me, my address is on my Wiggly page.