Back to 2008/03 Xoops Cube Legacy was reported to be heavy!? (In Japanese). XOOPS 2.0 JP obtained the highest score on that benchmark.
So, I start to review XCL code to speed up XCL 2.2.0 branch - tuning and optimizing XCL's development.

How much that has speed up?
I benchmark some XOOPS 2.0 derived CMS software.

- JPEx 1.9 (maintained XOOPS 2.0 JP)
- XCL 2.1.8a (first XCL release line)
- XCL 2.2.0 (current XCL release)
- XCL trunk[1070] (XCL's development code in SVN)
- XOOPS 2.5.4 (xoops.org Newest release)
- ImpressCMS 1.3

The measurement is based on Xdebug's profiler results.
Target site configuration is similar to http://myht.org/
And another condition, such as following:

Software OS: NetBSD 5.1/amd64, PHP 5.3.8, MySQL 5.0.92, apache 2.2.21
Hardware AMD Athlon64 X2 (2.2GHz) RAM 2GB

Installed modules (Some modules disabled to prevent output effect)
eguide 2.64, Xoops Update Server 0.36, pico 1.6, image 1.2,
altsys 0.71, bulletin 2.2 (inactive), shortcut 0.6,
profile 2.01, pm 1.08, news 1.1, d3forum 0.85,
mydownloads 1.1, mylinks 1.1, ccenter 0.96, mysite 2.12,
update 0.91 (inactive), xoopspoll 1.0, refpage 1.96,
d3pipes 0.68 (inactive)

The result:
Guest Unit ms


Admin (login) access


*1 XCL development code enables mainmenu block cache. Because that is revised for use any time.

*2 ImpressCMS 1.3 will be core rebuild and that includes debugging code.
This 1st release is not yet optimized (same stage as XCL 2.1).

Conclusion

XCL 2.2.0 is the fast one in recent XOOPS derived. And XCL development code will be near XOOPS 2.0 JP and in some conditions more than fast.
Well, Admin pages still too slow? That display more information and looks nicer, not same XOOPS 2.0 pages.