[Marco van Herwaarden]

First of all, the absolute number of queries is largely overrated as a measurement of how effective the script is. I can have 10 queries that have less impact on performence then a single badly written query.

Now to answer your question: based on the information you provide this is not possible to give a good answer as it will depend on many factors.

Some of them:
- How many rows in each table.
- The datatype of the columns used to JOIN/WHERE
- The cardinality of the data in these columns (the number of unique values compaired to the total number of rows). Selecting on a column containing a unique ID is something totally different then using a column with only 2 unique values (yes/no for example).
- The order in which the JOINS are done
- the amount of memory needed versus the amount available to MySQL on the server
- The storage type of the table.
- ...and many more