[Simon]

There were a number of changes in the latest svn as opposed to 9.1 - i've been following them myself and they have reduced query counts. I have also done a bit of hardcoding on my installation to reduce some of the functions (that contain queries) being called on the main pages.

I think Ash said he will be doing further optimisation shortly, so i'd hope to see the query count drop further.

Btw, maybe a nice debugging feature / plugin would be to display the number of queries per page (like Wordpress does for example)....oh wait there is one [ $db->num_queries ] - my front page is currently calling the database 41 times. It's not great, but even more established applications like wordpress can output more than that. If you add to that the "extras" like top stories and queued news (which I removed) then it all adds up.