For your first Magento skinning experience, double your budget and expect pain… or hire a professional (IE ). You can’t really get away with good design, HTML and CSS skills. You also need a solid understanding of OOD, XML, Zend Framework, Magento and a astrophysics degree. Once you’ve launched a couple of sites though, you can start to see that there are real benefits to the Magento skinning setup. You can always just purchase and hack at a existing template though. I don’t think our design team would allow that option, thankfully.

If you/your client are after an “enterprise grade” solution, Zend Server will surely help with the bloat. Zend Server’s full page caching (as opposed to Zend Framework/Magento full page caching) is a godsend. You can set up URLs that are cached and served without even hitting the PHP Stack – effectively a built-in reverse proxy. I haven’t tried this with Magento yet, but they are in cahoots, so I’d hope the Magento session management supports this feature.

For the “less enterprise” solution, we’ve had great results using XCache. I’d like to paste in a impressive chart of CPU levels halving, but that wasn’t really the case; the sites in question are noticeably more responsive though, and no more 3am SMS alerts.

You could also look for Magento optimised hosting partners and make it their problem.

As for enterprise vs community edition, I assume the enterprise version would have even more bloat given the extra feature set. Also, it would be pretty cruel if Magento only optimised the enterprise version.

A couple of tips from my experience:
- Make sure your servers have multi-core CPUs
- Set all Index Management to Manual Update, not Update On Save
- Convince yourself you can’t live without Zend Server.

This issue seems to be well known in the community as well.. Do you know if there is any difference between the community and enterprise edition in this regard? Any tips on Magento configuration?

From my opinion, you don’t necessarily need a formal document detailing what you are going to do on twitter. Sometimes this is what holds companies back. I suggest get on board and just start following people and then join the conversation. Its really not that hard.