@rene Believe it or not they do not exist on-server. Those values are gently cached instead. (That cache is actually quite new, implemented only three years ago.) As for why Count exists in database and the others are cached, you'd probably have to ask Jeff Atwood - that code does indeed go back that far.

In fact that section of code is 14 years old. It's been updated since then but a few lines have never been touched.

@Slate if it ain't broken don't touch it. As for a good Jeff meme: To cache or not to cache, that is the question.