Solid runner-up

We were using Easy Custom Auto Excerpt happily on a development site, until we ran a performance profiler. That revealed this was one of the plugins taking the most time to execute — on our particular server configuration, that is. We did a search to find another and finally reduced our average page-load time by ~1 second. Your mileage may vary, it’s possible there were interactions related to our particular setup; apart from that, it performed without flaw for us.