How to improve magento performance?

The following ideas I have deployed, which seem to have helped me a great deal.

1) Magento Caching.

Goto Magento Admin -> System -> Cache Management
– Tick the following items:
— Configuration
— Layouts
— Block HTML output
— Translations

-Untick the following items: (if ticked they seem to have a negative impact atm)
— Collections Data
— EAV types and attributes
— Web Services Configuration

2) Remove Home Page Elements
Goto Magento Admin -> CMS -> Manage Pages -> Home -> Custom Design
– The “Layout Update XML” box is pre-populated with functions and calls, all of which can be removed without any apparent problems, according to a number of forums comments.

3) MySQL Cache Size
Configure or ask your hosting company to switch on or tweak to ensure you have enough mysql cache. I have found the following to be a good reasonable size:
– query_cache_size=64M

4) Optimise your images

5) Combine external CSS/JS into one file

6) Disable any unused modules

7) Disable the Magento log .