Hi agentgorringe,
Thanks for posting the feedback. AWPCP is a complex plugin that does far more than your average plugin in WordPress. We are constantly evaluating it for performance enhancements and adding improvements. Our next release will address some of this issue.
However, you should also know that running AWPCP on a shared hosting environment with shared memory can cause it to slow down because of bottlenecking with other web request and resources. Most shared hosting environments give you 33-66MB of RAM, which is about 20-30x less than you have on your own desktop machine these days. That’s a paltry amount of memory for WordPress, let alone AWPCP, so if you are running in this kind of environment, you might consider upgrading your hosting a bit to something more like 128MB of RAM, which is more sensible for any site with traffic anyhow.
If you wish to try the beta, or continue the discussion I would welcome the opportunity to do so. Contact me here if you do: http://awpcp.com/contact/
