joomla/joomla-cms — pull request #4689 by pierinz (2014-10-16 00:28:56+00:00)
Title: Speed up getList(): generate query instead of $model->getItems()

mod_articles_popular has a simple task, but as the article number grows it gets really slow.
I got 450ms with ~7000 articles, which is unbearable. I rewrote the module with a custom query instead of model->getItems() call and it went down to 150ms. I'm pretty sure we can do it even faster.