Re: Is WP Supercache okay to use with BP?
I am using WP Super Cache on a BuddyPress installation right now, but it is not caching any of the BuddyPress or bbPress pages — only the blog. This actually does help a lot because it is the blog that gets a lot of search and direct traffic. WPSC is a great idea that works really well for pages that aren’t *too* dynamic, like a blog. It stores static versions of the pages so that they don’t have to be rebuilt all the time. Site response for a new visitor that hasn’t logged in is improved massively.
But for a very dynamic site (e.g. with activity lists updating frequently) you really need db object caching in memory (e.g. memcache) to speed things up and reduce the load on the db. I think this is what W3 Total Cache does, but I don’t (yet) have experience with it.
Andy also wrote this page on other optimization options: https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/improving-performance/
