I've done xdebug profiling and cake does add some non-negligiable overhead. However, 90% of the issue here is that the host is really crappy, and the latency on

I've done xdebug profiling and cake does add some non-negligiable overhead. However, 90% of the issue here is that the host is really crappy, and the latency on the db is bad, so view caching is helping. It'll be moved to a new host in 48-72 hours.