For better performance, don't use AJAX in Views
Get the most out of (and into) your page cache: Leave AJAX disabled in your Views, especially with exposed filters
Enabling AJAX for a Views page can have a performance-harming side effect one might not think of. On a recently built site we observed a relatively low Varnish cache hit rate of 30% using the Munin plugin for Varnish. This hit rate was much lower than expected after prelaunch tests with Jmeter. (The site has almost exclusively anonymous visitors and if caching the pages worked efficiently the same low cost server could handle a lot more traffic.)
An analysis of the most visited paths on the live site showed one ranking two orders of magnitude above all else: views/ajax.
The Views pages on Studio Daniel Libeskind have exposed filters, and with AJAX enabled new data is fetched via POST request to views/ajax when a visitor applies a filter. This happens because the Drupal AJAX Framework leveraged by views exclusively uses POST requests. See issue Ensure it is possible to use AJAX with GET requests for a good explanation of why it is currently this way and the effort to allow GET requests in later versions of Drupal.
As a consequence of all AJAX views using the same path and all filter information being hidden in the request body, Varnish has no straightforward means of caching the content coming from views/ajax. Another downside: It's not easy to share a link to a filtered version of such a page.
If AJAX is not enabled (which is the default) filters are implemented as query parameters in the URL so there's a unique URL for each filtered page. That plays well with reverse proxy caches like Varnish and works well for people wanting to share links, so we disabled AJAX again and the Varnish page cache hit rate has risen to over 90% since.