Performance of dynamically generated select boxes

I am rebuilding a php application to handle a higher load. The previous programmer had created a series of dynamically generated select boxes using a mysql table. Would it be faster or less resource intensive to create a series of arrays to generate the select boxes and avoid the database queries. I've done some informal testing using Pear Benchmark and it seems the array based script usually takes less time. thanks, Luis R. Lebron Project Manager Sigmatech, Inc