Foren / Cotonti / Support / Tips for better performance with Siena ?

Yeah since posting I been thinking about ways to work with that... I'll ask everyone submitting pages to upload the files to our server and also optimize them,they dont have to be 3000 pixels and 4mb... ridiculous.

Anyways I deleted those dead images and it helped a bit. but with that tool you linked me to, there is always a HUGE wait time for the site its self.. :(

Added 36 minutes later:

I'm looking into using expire headers for the skin files now

Added 18 minutes later:

Using some tools to check the websites performance I see this:

Resources with a "?" in the URL are not cached by some proxy caching servers. Remove the query string and encode the parameters into the URL for the following resources:

• http://streetlegalmods.com/rc.php?rc=global.nemesis.css
• http://streetlegalmods.com/rc.php?rc=global.nemesis.js

What can or should I do about that?

Added 5 minutes later:

I also see i have the option of using zend_optimizer and APC, what should I do, which one to use, or will that conflict with memcache or just not do anything?

Added 37 minutes later:

So i made some changes to htaccess to cache images and stuff etc , it looks like the score is better and the tool shows improvements, but its still complaining about the CSS and JS

Added 6 minutes later:

here is a shot from another tool also showing an issue with the CSS and JS links using "?" 

Also it complains about image dimensions , some of them are within the content but some seem to be in the CMF side, which of course I can still fix but maybe you guys would consider doing something with that for future releases? idk if thats a big deal or not

Added 60 minutes later:

Also have an option to use this

Varnish

Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architecture. One of the key features of Varnish Cache, in addition to its performance, is the flexibility of its configuration language, VCL. VCL enables you to write policies on how incoming requests should be handled. In such a policy you can decide what content you want to serve, from where you want to get the content and how the request or response should be altered.

Any thoughts?