Too much queries needed for loading the page.

My weblog is way slow lately and I tried a few solutions to boost up the performance.

I’ve tried a few solutions:

1. I removed all counters in order to boost up performance
2. I removed all images that were hotlinked, I’m now hosting them myself
3. I deactivated all WordPress plugins that weren’t that necessary.
4. I optimized and repaired the database of WordPress, and deleted unnecessary tables.

And I came to the conclusion that the SQL database is the problem, I added a bit of php code to see how much queries where needed to display the page and how long it took to perform those queries.

The results:

Displaying 30 posts, without disabling some plugins: 120 queries or something like that.
Displaying 30 posts and only using the necessary tables: 103 queries. 22.160 seconds. (I’m currently running this mode)
Displaying 10 posts: 43 queries. 1.201 seconds.

Or in other words: Way too much! It should be around 25-40 queries (afaik)

What could it be? And how can I drastically lower the amount of queries?

Thanks in anticipation 🙂