I have this site running on two VPS's (1 webserver, 1 db server, 1 gig ram each). I have used the same setup before with good performance. Free memory, no frequent app pool recycles, no/few errors in the event log. Heavy caching, few modules, few pages/tabs. Everything seemed healthy, but still, this last site didn't feel right. There was some lag when I clicked on links to navigate between pages....

I think I have found the cause of this performance problem. For each page view the database was being bombarded with frequent sql queries. Two queries stood out:

exec dbo.GetTabsByParentId @ParentId=xxx
exec dbo.GetTab @TabId=xxx

Hundreds of them! One page view filled the SQL server trace log with about 700-1200 lines (each query takes 4 lines). The funny thing is, many of the queries are identical! They are repeated for the same tab id's many times. 

My suspicion quickly turned to the Artisteer skin or it's menu. I switched to the default DNN skin, and the logs became normal again. Pages load instantly. A page view requires only a handful of queries to the database.

Question is: Has anyone else experienced this with Artisteer skins? 

I can agree to that the Artisteer skins are pretty close to unusable out of the box. But they seem pretty solid (w3C html/xhtml conformance) and are quite easy to modify. The skin I am using now does not look like the one that was generated from Artisteer, but the basic structure is still in place. I think Artisteer provides a good starting point for custom skinning. But the performance problem will be a show stopper if it's real and they can't or won't fix it...