I am using Firenzie, and my website seems to be quite slower that it was before implementing Joomla. Is this common? GoDaddy is my web hosting provider.
of course joomla is php+mysql and it will certainly be slower than a plain html site would be. Lots more going on and your especially worse off on a shared hosting environment because your mysql resources are going to be limited. Usually a good php accellerator + joomla caching makes a site run plenty fast enough. Probably the best advice is to cut back on the page load, extra modules, etc that could be adding extra db queries.
Regarding Joolma Caching. I advice Joomla 1.5 as the caching is much improved. Just go into the administrator and enable it in the global config. Translates into content being loaded from a cache rather than having to load from the db new everytime.
It really shouldn't be that much slower... if you have a Joomla site that isn't too laden down with 3rd party components that is.
I have found in my experience that enabling the rss feed seemed to slow things down, but maybe that was an anomaly - I also found that google analytics slowed the sites down a bit in 2 tries, but again perhaps an anomaly.
The member formerly known as Roland Deschain After your question is solved, please Edit your original post and choose the Solved message icon, thank you!
Unfortunately I've not had a chance to use it yet. The big sites I've built that would actually benefit from it have all had user-generated dynamic content (eg JomComment) which as I understand it, won't work with PageCache. I haven't bothered with smaller sites.
Roland, same with me.... Google Analytics and to a greater extent Adsense really slow page load.