Front end vs. Admin?

[bur...@burtonkent.com]

I inherited a project that uses a custom plugin that also utilizes the WP Document Revisions plugin.  When it's activated, the query count goes from 233 (according to Debug Bar) to over 3,000.  The page load time goes from about 2.33 seconds to over 12 seconds.

I've been looking at the queries involved, and for any post accessed it seems to be checking for the latest revision instead of going with the latest published post. I would have thought the revisions would be tracked/handled on the backend, and the front end would just display published posts. Am I wrong? By using this plugin, is every post's query rewritten or something?  Or is our plugin just coded improperly and causing problems?

I've been tasked with improving performance, but so far I'm not even sure how the code is supposed to work.

Thanks!