Backend Only?

We are running Joomla 1.5 on a high traffic site. The site sits behind a varnish server which caches all the pages. I trying to figure out if this plugin (pro or free) can be configured to work on the backend only. I only want to restrict certain admins to specific sections.

AUA can restrict access to sections, both frontend and backend. There is no option to restrict section-access at the backend AND allow section restrictions at the frontend at the same time. May I ask why you would need such functionality?

I do not want anything that will impact front end caching or performance in any way. If, on every page load, a database query occurs, this would not be acceptable.

It will check which page is loaded, if an article-edit page at the frontend, it will query to check if the user has access. So no performance loss.