My viewpage is build up with the help of three selects.

One to load the sub categories with the total number items.
One to load special items per sub category
One to load banner/advertisement information related to the parent category.

My question is:

Are 3 selects per viewpage to much? Can I build up this page with less selects?

I don't think it is too much. Sometimes, more smaller selects are better than one big one.

When tuning performance, make sure you have right indexes on tables, and you can also turn the second level cache. This will speed things a lot, and you don't have to ugly your code with making one select, than extracting values from it, etc..

Regards,
Pavol

okay thank you!