Autonav tuning woes - exclude_nav not being adhered until after loading page objects

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Does anyone have any experience with tuning the autonav? I'm specifically looking to make the initial query honor the "exclude_nav" setting BEFORE loading all of the page objects to iterate. The site im currently working on has around 3k pages or so, most of which are at or below the 3rd level of the nav and set to "exclude_nav". When I limit the levels to only 2, my page loads uncached are around 2s, but going to 3 makes them push closer to 5-7s. This tells me the "levels" are being preemptively excluded from the initial load of pages, but "exclude_nav" is NOT.

Just wanting to float this out there and see if anyone has a solution that they've worked with. I would really like to avoid going to a "managed" or hard-coded autonav for the sake of performance, so please help me avoid that if possible.

Thanks guys!
Andrew

aghouseh