With the start of the school season, the request rate and thus load have gone way up in the last few weeks. A few more Apache boxen are being planned for, but we also have some optimization to do in storage access patterns. On Domas's urging I've added a cache for extracted revision text using memcached. This can reduce both the load on the external storage servers as well as the time spent decompressing and extracting individual items from a bulk storage blob. According to live profiling data on en.wikipedia and de.wikipedia, the time spent in Revision::getRevisionText has dropped from the 40s to the 10s in percentage, with a corresponding increase in memcached::get from about 8% to about 18%. That's a drop of about 200ms per average profiled request in realtime during the US-daytime-Europe-evening rush. Hopefully it keeps up and doesn't cause any other problems; I've set it to cache for an hour, but this could be reduced or increased as necessary. The setting is $wgRevisionCacheExpiry and is available in 1.8 on SVN trunk, disabled by default. To be useful, it requires the main $wgMemc cache to be set up, and you should have a fair amount of external storage in use or else it might just be slower to make all those memcached queries. :) -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)