[JoBullet]

Most of each client's data is indeed cached in the server. In this case passing-by-reference has little to no impact on the code speed, it's more probable that return value was intended to be used as success/failure value, which is good design decision but in the end not used at all because of unknowledgable scripters. Note about measuring things: I bet you forgot to measure cache misses/hits, context switches, privilege switches etc., it's good idea to measure timings of e.g. two different ini systems or similar, but bad to measure things like you measured @AndreT.