But… I would say wait a month before you put it on your site.
Scripts Gzip seems like a great plugin, but there have already been issues in the forums about it having installation and directory problems.

Since this guy got placed in the Wordpress plugin rss, I am guessing the script is legit, but would wait until he can get the bugs out. People, help this man test the plugin!

This plugin allows you upload css, javascript, and even php for a specific page or post. Instead of add if…then statements in the theme, you can use this plugin.

What is better, if you want to dabble with multiple themes in different posts, this plugin will let you do it. Haven’t heard of many bugs yet, and it doesn’t seem to have a lot of popularity in the WP community.

This isn’t a review; I haven’t had time to review these plugins. But I have done a lot of Googling and have found a lot of information to help people understand each plugin and decipher which ones they need. This is written in Jan. 2010, so if you see this post a year later, these plugins may have been upgraded, and a lot better/worse than the time of this writing.

• This is a forum for W3 Total Cache. From people’s comments, it seems to have problems with dynamic sidebar content ( such as rotating banners ) and adding comments on different themes.
• For the forum above, this plugin seems to also have a lot of issues with distorting themes. Probably should wait until there is an upgrade from its current version ( give the man some money!)*-see below for updated info on W3 Total Cache.
• This guy says that DB Cache reloaded is better than WP Super-Cache. But this blogger puts it in perspective: WP Super Cache helps more for sites where some posts get a lot of traffic, and DB Cache helps sites that get a lot of traffic for many posts ( ie: Craigslist = DB Cache. Maxim.com = WP Super Cache ).
• Donncha’s WP Super Cache forum: He will answer them in a timely manner.
• Remember that DB cache stores db requests, and super cache stores html pages ( if you didn’t read the post above. ).
• Anyone know about this plugin Object Cache?

The creator of the W3 Total Cache plugin has a rebuttal to my comments:

- Fragment caching is coming in the next W3TC release, making the few users that don’t have ideal implementations for (some) widgets happy.
- W3TC doesn’t break site layouts, minify is tricky and many users use settings that are unsafe for their particular themes because themes are all of varying quality and complexity. Minifcation is not something that can be automated although some try and those plugins actually break sites.
- Please use these forums for W3TC here, not on my site: http://wordpress.org/tags/w3-total-cache or http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/tags/w3-total-cache
- Database caching reduces the execution time for generating new pages, but nothing will ever be faster than providing apache an .html file to serve a page until there are changes to the way operating systems work. So add a database cache to your site if you want to reduce page generation time.
- Object caching at that site is basically using opcode caching to store the contents of wp_options table required to answer various requests and also reusing the memory storage for the finalize objects like pages or queries.

At the moment, W3TC is the only plugin to optimize, browser, front-end and backend performance for WordPress and there’s far more to come before release.

This is good to hear. Frederick Townes means business, and the W3 Total Cache plugin could be a popular and dominant script for Wordpress for times to come. Thanks; I will add you to my blog roll.

UPDATE: Donncha has some input on the Object Cache:

The Object Cache has nothing to do with an opcode cache though. It’s simply a cache (using your desired storage mechanism – memory as in memcached, xcache etc, or disk) for options and high level objects in WordPress.

For example, the in-development version of wp-super-cache can use the object cache to store cached pages. If your object cache uses memcached, it caches to RAM, and doesn’t even have to be on the same server as the web server.
Batcache does this too.

Related information: Opcode Cache for Dummies

Thanks guys for giving some input on my post. If someone wants to do some benchmarking and/or extra comparison with these plugins, I will more than welcome it ( and link it here ). I am not good with time these days, but understand the importance of this topic.