General speed/performance on large Craft build Looking for hints and tips on speeding up and streamlining performance of a Craft site as we prepare for launch. 

The database is approaching 100MB and whilst it is a fairly large and complex build (multiple locales with fairly extensive use of Matrix) this seems fairly excesive and page load times can be slow. Have looked at the Patrick Pohler post but any general, system level wins would be great as site is crawling a fair bit.

Am getting some performance increase through use of {% cache %} tags but then hitting DeleteStaleTemplateCaches issue qiute regularly which is stopping tasks running.

Any help appreciated!
We are constantly seeing the deleting stale template cache timeout problem on our servers - try increasing the time PHP can execute for to something very long. It seems like clearing the caches counts as one PHP request and not a bunch of tasks, so they can time out.

Good use of cache tags helps, and caching globally can also help - but other than that all I've found to make complex Craft builds faster is using something like Varnish or nginx. Neither of which are simple and both of which I've avoided so far.

PHP7 will help a lot, but I'm not aware of any distro that has PHP7 available yet.