UPDATE - 2014.05.11.: Magento is just bloatware, don’t ever bother using it.

I’m developing a custom Magento theme. Well, trying to… I’m only getting familiar with how the system works and I’ve set up a webshop on localhost using WAMP.

The problem was that the store was insanely slow. Page loads took 5-10 seconds, and saving changes at the backend were easily 10sec+. I found out that Magento was indeed quite resource hungry but nothing I found on stackoverflow or other forums seemed to help. Also my temp wamp/tmp directory grew by Gigabytes since I started using Magento.

Then I came across this thread. It says we should try disabling the profiling in Xdebug.
And like magic, it solved both of my problems. Magento runs 4-5 times (!) faster now, page loads take max 2-3 seconds and the tmp director isn’t growing like a mushroom anymore.
I’m only putting this up because it took me quite some time to figure out and it may help other magento newbs.
It also shows that I should learn a lot more about the PHP extensions, caching, profiling and benchmarking.