[digitalpoint]

Well the reason I've been so reluctant to add a preference for it is I'm also an efficiency freak and like to shave nanoseconds off whatever I can... So for a setting that I don't (personally) see much use for, this is the math...

It would take roughly 200 bytes of PHP memory to *have* the setting, so that's just an extra 200 byts of memory that need to be allocated for each and every request. Let's say that allocating that added 1/500,000th of a second to the HTTP request (no idea what it would be, just throwing a number out there). For my site, we have approx 2,500 HTTP requests per second going through the vBulletin init process (we do things with it other than just the forum obviously). So 216M requests/day pulling data from the datastore and dumping it into memory. To the grand scheme of things, we just added a net effect of 432 seconds of unnecessary wait time to HTTP requests for the day just by *having* the setting.

In addition, it would add about 15 bytes to the datastore (which in our case is memcached... so it's going through the network to whatever web server is serving the request). Which is a net effect of 3GB of local network traffic each day for us.