I’d had a site in a similar state, and I did figure out what it was doing.
Client had launched a product that was a bit more successful than typical. Nobody could access the site though. I dig around a little, come to find a neat little snippet of template looking for a featured user for some markup.
The genius who set this up iterated through each record trying to find the featured item. One query at a time, testing each record in the application for the flag.
Php is fine, some very inexperienced “developers” use it though so you find a lot of gems like that in the space.
Client had launched a product that was a bit more successful than typical. Nobody could access the site though. I dig around a little, come to find a neat little snippet of template looking for a featured user for some markup.
The genius who set this up iterated through each record trying to find the featured item. One query at a time, testing each record in the application for the flag.
Php is fine, some very inexperienced “developers” use it though so you find a lot of gems like that in the space.