The new version of News Portal is out, but I have done some customization and I am not going to upgrade right away unless some of the performance issues were addressed.  Can anyone comment if this version is faster?  Fewer queries?  On a typical News Portal page of my site, the NP component runs 40-50 queries and the site is less responsive now as more content has been added.

Has the dev team looked at performance in this release?

Thanks,
Bryan