browse mode performance

[Chris]

Hello, I'm a new user and I'd like to know what your opinion(s) are
regarding the performance of browse mode?  My guess is that the amount of
I/O to write out so many image files to disk is a major bottleneck.

Is there any way for mapserver to create interactive maps in 'map' mode?
How can I get MapServer tags values without running in browse mode?

Thanks for reading.

Regards,
Chris