Our events can be pretty large (20,000+ registrations per event). As the quantity of registrants increases, the initial view - even though the default is set to show 20 - is getting slower. If you filter by event and pick an event with very few registrations, that is fast. Is there any query optimization that could be done to be able to deal with large data sets?
I'm curious about this as well. While we do not have the large number of registrants per event, we will have a large number of events. In poking around the database, it does not seem to be optimized very well.
One thing you may want to try is to turn on the joomla debug mode (Admin -> Site -> Global Configuration -> System) so you may be able to get an idea of what is slowing your page down. After each page loads, you will see a summary at the bottom of the page with load time and the queries that are run. I'm finding DT Register to very query intensive. These are results for number of queries to generate various pages on my site:
List of Events for Registration: 0.483 seconds load time, 74 queries
Event Detail Article: 0.339 seconds, 12 queries
Event Registration Page: 1.397 seconds, 651 queries
Attendee List (display length 50): 1.317 seconds, 1508 queries
Attendee List (display length 100): 2.410 seconds, 2958 queries
Attendee List (display length ALL [275 users]): 6.417 seconds, 7993 queries