What can i delete to make things run faster?
 

I'm wondering how to lighten our load by deleting all the fancy crap from our site. I'm wondering what can be deleted and what needs to stay. I've started with a few plug ins. Will simply uninstalling them do the trick?

What else can i do to make it less server intensive and ue less memory?

Ideally, i'd just like to go back to a vert basic forum format

Simply disabling plugins should be enough to stop them, but you can also uninstall them.
Refer to http://ozzmodz.com/showthread.php/25...Within-The-ACP if you want some tips on how to optimize your forum from within the admincp.

Just don't delete ANYTHING, you should optimise your server and apache in specific to get it fast. We run with +/- 50 plugins, use great caching, optimised both the database and apache and using a CDN we're blazing fast for a vB system. vB is quite a heavy software on the clean install, so all you need is optimising your server.

I remember you and I having a somewhat long discussion about this very thing, some time back. I gave you many suggestions for speeding up your site.

When fully 35% of your page load bytes are font files - which most browsers won't render anyway but still download - I start looking there for trimming fat.

Here's a detailed analysis of your splash page: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150225_CW_10WG/

You can shave 250kb off this page just by optimizing your images. Will help your speed alot, just with that.

Here's detailed analysis of your forum, where most of your users go: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/150225_M8_110N/

The problems with the forum appear to be mostly hosting related. The forum itself isn't too fat, and doesn't have a egregious number of calls, and I see you did optimize your images here - should be loading ALOT faster than 13 seconds.

The splash page - you understand that's not helpful at all for your SEO? Google hates slow, fat pages.

vBulletin all native and out of the box is NOT quite heavy. It's lightweight. vB4 is heavier than vB3.8 however, but marginally so.

vBulletin itself, isn't a problem.