[TYPO3-english] TYPO3 6.x caches and performance best practices for productive site

[Domi]

Hello,

here comes my beloved topic of TYPO3 with some more experience since 
last time I asked about this. But for me its important because there 
seem to be changes of 4.x caching to 6.x.

Setup:
- local webserver on newest PHP 4.11, SSD harddrive with i7 and newest 
current MySql stable on archlinux.
- Website with around 1000 pages and lot of content.
- Backend layout with 9 columns, from this 9 columns 6 are set to 
contentSlide=-1.
- FLUIDTEMPLATE takes care of rendering the content
- all files gets included with pageRenderer() build in function
- 3 level HMENU with a lot of links generated
- REALURL takes care of readable urls

TYPO3 6.x
Uncached, admPanel = 1
Rendering time total: 13.4 sec.
- 3 level HMENU : 3589 sec.
- all Content : ~8 sec.

Uncached or opened TYPO3 backend, admPanel = 0
Rendering time for first GET of index.html: 8.81 (waiting) sec.
Rendering time total: 9.47 sec.

Cached with closed backend,
Rendering time for first GET of index.html: 128ms or 2ms (from cache)
Rendering time of whole page < 500 ms or 250ms (from cache)

Question 1:
Is it "normal" that for a logged in backend user the website always is 
uncached, it takes always around 9 sec to load. I had in my mind, that 
in 4.x branch the frontend could be cached even if I logged into BE.

Question 2:
The rendering of the menu which takes over 3 seconds seems very slow. 
Also the DB calls for the content elements. In my experience it was slow 
in 4.x already, but I never reached 5 seconds in total.
Is contenSlide=-1 really a suitable technique or should it be used with 
care? I came from TemplaVoila and use now fully backend_layouts with the 
sliding options, but the DB takes are very long. Are there any good 
options of optimizing the DB calls?

Question 3:
Is there some extension which could run as cronjob once a day and sets 
the cache for each page? Because if google would crawl once my page 
without the TYPO3 cache it would be a nightmare...

Thanks for reading and insights!

Regards,
Dominic