Gnome “performs” just as well as anything else. In fact, it is better than Xfce4 in some ways as it is Wayland based.
I’m not sure why you think gnome is somehow this bloated desktop that lags and is slow. I’ve been using gnome for quite some time and it has never been what you describe. Gnome isn’t any heavier than anything else when it comes to IO. You seem to have just arbitrarily decided that gnome is slow without much in the way of evidence.
Xfce4 is probably going to be lighter weight overall than gnome or KDE. However, it isn’t this magical desktop and if your computer is bound up by a drawing text and icons on the display then Xfce4 is not going to help you. KDE and Gnome are both a little ram heavy but that’s because they are much bigger desktops.