faster output from php and postgres --please help!

Hi, I am dealing with a database with many-to-many relation and have a php script that joins these tables and displays the output. But the problem is that after entering some 50 records the output is very slow! I can count till 50 before the script produces the output! The complete description of the problem is written below.. Thanks in advance, Mukta description in detail: database part: Three tables: paper,author and author_paper "A paper has many authors and an author has many papers." In this way there is many to many relation. The attributes of paper are: paper_id (primary key),title,journal,year etc The attributes of author are: author_id(primary key) and name The attributes of author_paper are: author_id ,paper_id and level ( author with level=1 is the main author of the paper ) php part: For an author: 1. get author_id from author table 2. select all paper_ids from author_paper table 3. For each of the above selected paper_ids: a. print all the attributes of paper b. select all authors of the paper and print their names in the order of their "level"