Can you tell me is there a huge performance difference between the current dev relese and the stable release?

I am finding that drupal is a huger server hog and I need to cut my use of resources and am going through my entire list of installed modules and finding those which are not optimized for sql...

Can you tell me is there a huge performance difference between the current dev relese and the stable release? Am I taking a huge resource hit by using the dev version rather than the stable release? I like the functionality of the dev version....

Thanks!