General discussion

My site is slow. It is running Drupal and it has over 11000 nodes. I want it to be very busy as everyone does, but it seems really slow and I'm freaking out that it is turning visitors away. I installed the devel module to get some page load times, here is what the index page shows me. It doesn't always seem this slow, but more often than not, people are waiting 10 plus seconds for the page to load which is way too long. I am running a lot of modules, because I need the functionality. Any suggestions at all for speeding it up are greatly appreciated.

Particulars:
The site: http://www.freejournal.net
Running: Drupal 4.6
Modules: album, amazon, badbehaviour, blog theme, blogroll, buddylist, emailpage, excerpt, fckeditor, folksonomy, ii404, inactive_user, mailhandler, notify, privatemsg, profile, simplenews, subscriptions, userpoints, voting

Index page load times as per devel module:

Executed 135 queries in 51726.5 microseconds. Queries taking longer than 5 ms, and queries executed more than once, are highlighted.
ms # query
1.66 1 SELECT * FROM access WHERE status = 1 AND type = 'host' AND LOWER('67.70.31.65') LIKE LOWER(mask)
0.75 1 SELECT * FROM access WHERE status = 0 AND type = 'host' AND LOWER('67.70.31.65') LIKE LOWER(mask)
0.66 1 SELECT * FROM access WHERE status = 1 AND type = 'referrer' AND LOWER('http://www.freejournal.net/drupal/node/11782') LIKE LOWER(mask)

Below is an email I sent to a coder helping me in trying to get a site up. To me this is the biggest problem with Drupal. It ticks me off how much time I've spent trying to solve rather simple problem, getting no responses to my forum "How to" request, searching the forums and handbooks and still not getting a simple, workable answer. If Drupal didn't have all this good potential, I'd drop it like a stone.

"Can we get a home or front page set up? I've uploaded a couple of modules that might work. It is unbelievably obscure on Drupal how to set uyp simple blocks on a page (not in the right or left sidebars). I've searched and searched. There are all sorts of php snippets and what not, but no one responds to simple request from a non-coder on how to make a page that has blocks in the damned page. This is the frustrating thing about Drupal. The jump from administrator to coder is huge. It should be simple as pie just to set this up, insert standard module blocks, and run. But it's obscured by coder-speak.

It seems to me the easiest would be to use Dashboard (I've enabled it) and to put the php code in the block divisions to list the modules I've mentioned before. I want to have this thing off the ground and stop my obsessing about it. It's like a hang nail I keep pulling on. This Drupal stuff has so much potential, but has such a big gap between administrator and coder. Pisses me off! I'm smart enough to whip up html websites, I shouldn't need to learn php to whip up such an otherwise wonderfully packaged thing as Drupal!

I am new to Drupal. Just wanted to ask about the 'News Page Module'. Is it worthwhile using? What is the full functionality of the module?

What happened with submission queue in 4.6?

It´s show duplicates votes and I can´t solved it.... anyone know about?

Just wondering if any of you can help me answer these questions:

How many people are developing Drupal? Besides the community contributions.
Any commercial company backing (sponsors)?
Number of downloads/installations?
Is there support for intergration of documents made outside of Drupal? For example, eZ apparently has a module that allows one to import oo.o documents into the CMS.

If anyone could answer at least some of these questions it would be very much appreciated!

There's a host of small little things in 4.7 that I'd like to start using (password reset email, search, random other bug fixes that I've seen committed to HEAD). I get the feeling that upgrades aren't particularly automated anyway, Also, I've seen 2 references today to sites running HEAD. Is there a list of critical bugs left in 4.7 that need to be fixed before a release candidate is out? Has the database schema settled down? Are more features going in still? Can anyone provide any other advice or opinions on whether upgrading to current CVS is a good idea?