About 2 years ago (soon after Drupal 7 was released), I had a site with a number of fields attached to a content type. When I had to clear caches and reload a page, it would take an awfully long time. This is because the site would need to run load each node, run a query for each field, process it, and more. What was good, though, is that all of these fields would then get placed into the cache_field table so the node could load faster on subsequent loads.

performanceentitiesdrupalplanet drupal