Hello,
I am still having this problem, although I believe that it is specific to the settings of MediaWiki, seeing that I have other MediaWiki installations (also 1.7.1) on the same server, and they do not have this problem.
When a user loads the recent changes page on my wiki, the CPU utilization on my server goes up to 99 to 100% for a single Apache process, and that process stays alive for *exactly* 60 seconds (which also happens to be the cutoff time for PHP scripts on my server). This only happens *after* the recent changes page has been sent to the browser, and the connection has been closed (I have KeepAlive off).
I have no idea what is going on, and any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Kasimir Gabert