Seems to.

The main thrill about is is that it reduces the load on the database server.

We have about 1.1 million posts these days so anything that makes our db server's life easier
is very welcome !

in summary what it does is compress the category select in with the forum select so that
you are only doing one sql query rather than 1+ number of forums in your db ..

It helps a bit

The next hack ( coming in about 10 mins ) also does help the db loading.

If you want to see the difference tell mysql to do logging tail the log and
compare the two.

The next hack makes that test look very very very very scary indeed

fodder