Not a real post this really, more of a snippet, but something of interest. I just switched on view cacheing for my UK Business Directory (a personal project of mine) and by my rough and ready benchmarking with firebug the load times increased by 75%. The site is hosted on Dreamhost which whilst great value for money and very featureful isn’t always the fastest of hosts, so it has made a real difference.
I’ve also just added fulltext search to the site – its slightly unusual in that it searches two tables at either end of a HABTM relationship, when I get the time I’m planning to write a quick post about setting that up with CakePHP.