So after following the suggestions on this blog post I noticed a significant (~300%) improvement in the loading times of Items in the Content Editor.
I am considering publishing this to our testing server for a few days and see how it behaves, are there any counter-indications about doing this on Production? Will cache stop growing when memory is full, or could it lead to server instability?
Additionally, would I notice a similar increase in performance if I was to enforce cache limit but set them to fill them the entire RAM of the server?
According to Sitecore Scaling Guide documentation:
<setting name="Caching.DisableCacheSizeLimits" value="true" />Sitecore recommends that the cache size limits are disabled on 64-bit systems with ample memory
See http://sdn.sitecore.net/upload/sitecore7/70/cms_tuning_guide_sc70-72-a4.pdf chapter 4.5.4.
I've tested this in few projects and there was only one issue - rebuilding Solr indexes took much longer then usually in Sitecore 7.2 rev 140526 (20 minutes vs 6 hours). I haven't tested this with Lucene indexes.
It has been fixed in Sitecore 7.2 rev. 141226 (7.2 Update-3). Except from that I haven't experienced any issues and it's recommended by the Sitecore to enable this settings so I think it is safe to do this (assuming you're running on 64-bit server).
If your site is based on earlier rev of Sitecore 7.2 than rev. 141226, you may want to confirm this with Sitecore support that there are no more issues related to this setting.