In response to a recent thread on the mailing list, I was able to identify three key areas in the code that could be optimized for efficiency.
The following solutions were conjured up as a result:
Because of these changes, category archives can now be configured to acquire a minimal set of entry metadata reducing a significant amount of time wasted. Total time to process a full update of my weblog with a total of 87 entries and two categories was reduced by about three minutes!
If you really, really want to comment, please mail n1xt3r@fastmail.fm