base_convert crashing server?

I have a webapp where I use base_convert($database_id, 36开发者_开发百科) to convert the id to base 36 for the URL. My site stayed up and saw some good traffic early on and was extremely responsive and stable.

Now, after a few months I have something like 130k records and my server is crashing from much less traffic than it saw early on at it's release.

I saw in the php manual that base_convert may lose accuracy with large numbers, so I'm wondering if this could possibly be bugging out my server and crashing it?

How do I do that base conversion without using base_convert to test this out?

As pointed out in the comments - this indeed was NOT my problem. I had inadvertently left the database set in a debug mode on the production server which was obviously creating a lot of overhead. Thanks for the answers, helped me know I should be looking somewhere else!