A system and article of manufacture providing a high performance access control list. The preferred embodiments operate in a computer network having a plurality of users of the network and comprising a database management system and a content management system controlling access to a plurality of entities shareable by the users of the network, the content management system using an access control list table having group privilege rules and user privilege rules for controlling access to the entities. A high performance ACL system and article of manufacture is provided, the system and article including a run-time compiled ACL table, wherein the compiled ACL table provides resolved privilege rules for each of the users at run-time, and using the compiled ACL table, the content management system accesses user-selected ones of the entities based on the resolved privilege rules.