I've created a new version of wiki -- wiki.fcgi, which means 'FastCGI'. This is now handling all of the requests of the form: http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/foo
but requests for the edit pages and so on still go to the original script.
This minimizes the chances of problesm -- wiki.fcgi is only handling requests that are 'read-only'. It can also handle edits, at least in my testing, but for now I'm not implementing that.
This has resulted in a reducting in the number of wiki.cgi that have to be run from 20-30 per minute to 4-5. Those numbers are for right now, a Saturday evening when traffic is low.
We were getting very overloaded during busy days. This should solve that problem for awhile. :-) Later, if this works fine, I may have the fastcgi do everything, which would solve the problem for a LONG while.
I'm excited about moving forward with Magnus's PHP code, of course. So this is a stopgap measure until we get that running.