Dear barone
About notice messages, it doesn't effect to your site performance. You can hidden theme by opening the file PHP.ini:
In this file search for the phrase “ error_reporting = E_ALL” ,[without inverted commas]
Here replace this with “error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_NOTICE & ~E_WARNING “ (Show all errors, except for notices and coding standards warnings)
or Don't worry about these notices. Please go to administrator page > "Global Configuration" > tag "Server" > tag " Error Reporting" please choose "None".
thanks