[Robin]

Maybe I don't understand what you're doing here.. But as far as I can see, you're loading all of the player's items and then adding them as Weapons.. but you're sending the client all the data from the database?

I'm not going to pretend to know about the way the NPC Server works with SQL (Seeing as, this is the first time I've ever seen it mentioned) but when dealing with web development, game development, business databases, you tend to certainly not ever "SELECT * FROM `table`", limit your data, give the client a chance, load it in parts.

For example, I built a system to show different reports of user statistics of my company's app. It'd work fine in Firefox, but in IE6 (one of our main customer's only browser x-x) it would crash it, or make it hang.

By loading the page, then subsequently loading the data via AJAX and creating the flash based charts sequentially as they were needed, rather than every bit of data being downloaded at once, not only did it not crash anymore but it was FAST.

I'm thinking the problem here is a mixture of limitations of the client and the ineffciency of the code in relation to how you're pulling the data from the database.

Do you have control over the tables? i.e. the ability to add proper indexes and keys?