I've had an issue recently where there was a lot of load time for a site. While working on it, one thing I noticed is that the autonav is making 500+ SQL queries every time that it loads. Even after caching the block, it would still make that many queries.

The reason this was an issue is because this particular site was connecting to a remote database, so even though it only had 1ms of latency, multiplying that by 500+ queries led to a lot of load time.

I checked some other sites that I'd worked on recently, and they all have the same amount of queries in the autonav block, so it seems that it's normal for the autonav to make that many queries.

With all of the above, my question is this: is there any where to reduce the amount of database queries that the autonav makes? I've seen some ideas floating around about the autonav being modified so that it creates an XML/JSON file whenever the sitemap is updated. And that is loaded in instead of calling the database.