Categories Module Slowdown with 300+ items?

[tmouse]

I am having problem with slow loading of PrestaShop pages (localhost/hosted).

Page loads in about 7-12 seconds.

I was trying to nail down where the time goes and my limited skills made me believe that problem might be with Categories Module, which is currently showing about 300 categories in 4 levels.

What I have established:

FireBug says that browser was waiting for initial response about 80% time - 6-7 seconds.
Downloading 8KB took below 1s
PHP Profiler says that page took about 25ms time to prepare.

Removing categories module from the page takes wait time down to 0-3seconds and download (2KB) is down to below 0,5s.


My questions:
- has anyone else tried large amount of categories and experienced similar problems?
- if I am correct, and this is categories block problem what can be done? dividing categories in sub-areas and starting categories tree from some subcategory? Or some caching of category data?

PS. I am using latest 1.2 from SVN with some local changes already done.