Thomas Morton, 14/04/2013 15:40:
Caching and Nginx are your first friends, every time.
Maybe the first, but in such cases usually the best is learning to link only a Wikimedia project page from the sitenotice or centralnotice. Notices get a lot of random clicks, few are interested in proceeding to the server where the meat is. Moreover, on our wikis we can use the Translate extension. I think this common sense rule may be added to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CentralNotice/Usage_guidelines. Only destinations tested for the load should be linked.
Nemo