In looking at the issues with terrible load times of some concrete5 installations, I have developed a replacement cache for the Concrete5 Zend Cache. Initial results look good with the "Time To First Byte" (TTFB) being approximately halved for 4 live test sites, however, none of the sites suffer from the types of load-time problems some are suffering from.

Whilst it seems that the replacement cache improves the Concrete5 TTFB on all sites and doesn't suffer from the deterioration over time, what I am looking to find out is if it can resolve those sites suffering from extended load times (10, 20 secs etc) but before you say "great", there are some requirements.

1. You must be comfortable with PHP and modifying the core.
2. you must have SQLite 3.7.x installed on your site or prepared to install/upgrade it.
3. Site must be viewable over the internet (not an internal development machine).
4. Site must be suffering from long TTFB (5 secs or more)
5. Must be running Concrete5 5.6.0.2

For an example; here is the benchmark from one of my sites running with Zend
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121127_P0_RWX/...

(TTFB varies from 800ms to 1.5 seconds so the result is "typical")

Here is the same site running the replacement cache
http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121127_J2_RZ7/...

(TTFB varies from 480 ms to 580 ms so the result is again "typical")

For anyone interested, please email me at the address in the Miser readme or PM me with an email address that I can send the files to.

Phallanx.