Deprecated - Performance and scalability

To start...yes, I've gone through the forums and I have seen variations of this topic discussed. BUT, I have yet to see an answer much different than pointing the blame at the shoddy code/practices used by other aggregators. Drupal rss feeds have some issues, for example, with the "My Yahoo" aggregator. Understandable. What I like about Drupal and it's commnity is that they do things correctly and don't skimp on the technical side...others do.

I get an error (in Apache error_log):

FATAL: emalloc(): Unable to allocate XX bytes

I increased 'memory_limit' PHP parameter to 32M (a maximum allowed by my hosting provider) but it doesn't help.

How to limit memory consuming of Drupal scripts?

(I use CivicSpace distribution based on Drupal 4.6.6 and CiviCRM 1.3)

Drupal,

Having my shared host currently loading my Drupal web-site's first page in 0.3 -1 sec. And thats only one user. Is this times are very critical as for using Drupal by much more ppl?
Is it possible to speed up Drupal even if striping some of its functionality?

I am running Drupal 4.6.2 in a R&D environment where researchers are encouraged to submit RSS feeds.

Currently we have about 1000 RSS feeds.

Here is a list of projects we are looking for collaborators to develop with.