The Drupal community likes to brag about the thousands of contributed modules, but there's a little secret that should be publicly and widely stated: If you install 1,000 modules on your site, your doing it so wrong you'll probably need a complete Drupalectomy.

Drupal performance and scalability expert Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits.com regularly gives talks about helping sites serve two to three million page views a day, tens of millions of visitors a month, on a single server with none of the usual reverse proxy, caching, content delivery network, noSQL databases, or Drupal modifications that are the stock and trade of scaling.

His first step, after making sure the server itself is tuned for serving Drupal and doesn't have extra stuff going on, is to remove all unnecessary modules. This means:

• Less code to load/execute
• Less memory to consume
• Less database queries

Equally important, and in fact more important for a new site that may not ever have to handle millions of visitors a month, is not increasing the conceptual complexity of your site.