[Question] What is the right balance of Plugins installed?

[GazzaGarratt]

I'm trying to understand what people think the right amount of plugins are for an IPS Board? I suppose the same goes for Applications.

I can only imagine the worlds your oyster, however I've already learned the issue of having too many is that when a problem arises there is many plugins to disable and check through. There's some great developers on here and they've created some amazing applications and plugins that are so useful that you would hope that some become a core piece of software.

What are the Pros/Cons to having more plugins/applications in your opinion? Do you suffer on load times? Does there come a point where a plugin you depend upon should be written in code or left always as the plugin/application? It makes me spin off in so many directions so i'm keen to understand what you all think.

Thanks in advance (and apologies if this topic is in the wrong place)

[Rhett]

The pros to plugins and apps are they add some functionality

The con is you are adding queries, overhead, more ram usage, creating upgrade issues and slowing the site more with each one you add.

The key items to be aware of when using third party items, are as follows.

1. Do you have to have it?  If not, less is more in terms of your time dealing with them. 
2. It's a good idea to do some homework on the author of the item, as all third party items are supported by the author only.
3. Each time you upgrade, you first need to ensure that your third party items will work with the newest version you are upgrading too. (see #1)
4. How busy is your site? compared to how many items you are adding, there is a balance on performance when you are adding many third party items, as each one will likely increase the resources needed to maintain proper performance. It's a balance based on your site, your third party items, and how busy your site is.
5. A simple plugin can be fine on a normal traffic site, but put that on a site with 500-1500 online and it kills it, not many developers have a site with heavy traffic to test and optimize on, so this is a common issue on busy sites. 
6. There really is no one size fits all answer to these questions, it would be based on many factors, your hosting performance, your traffic, and how many third party items you are using.

From a support perspective, when I see a site with 20+ plugins and 20+ apps, we tend to get to know those people very well, as they spend half there time chasing down issues with third party items.  

My opinion, keep it clean, keep it fast, and keep it simple, more is not always better in most cases.