@ Jocelyn
“slugglishly” … The site loads between 2 and 3 seconds on average [according to Pingdom] which a fairly typical of a site that isn’t heavily cached/optimized. I’d say that’s pretty good considering I’m running over 75 plugins and a heavy theme. On my dev site where only TwentyTwelve and Connections is loaded, it is very fast. So I know all the plugins and the theme are responsible. I’ve optimized as much as I could. The only item I can yet do is implement full page caching, then I’d get get 1 sec loads but I’ve found that the cart plugin doesn’t work as well. You might want to look into caching plugins and/or using Cloudflare.
In as far as Connections is concerned, its queries are no slower than the ones run by WordPress itself. That is something I do pay close attention to. I do have some plans to make some minor optimizations using object caching and partial page caching for Connections related items, but I don’t really anticipate any type of substantial improvement from it.
If you have a moment, I’d true appreciate a review. Many thanks in advance!
http://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/connections
