Brion-
I've temporarily disabled talk page notification for IP addresses that aren't logged in, as this dumps an extra database query for every single hit.
If it doesn't make a big difference, it'll get turned back on shortly.
Hmz, how do we measure "big difference"? Wikipedia has been everything from "dog slow" to "super fast" since this announcement, but that's about the usual. I don't believe one SELECT to a small table on each pageview matters much, but then again, I still don't understand all the locking issues which we seem to have. Remember the orders-of-magnitude increase in speed after we switched the searchindex to a static copy? Yet I don't really see why it ended up being locked so much.
Presently I see locking issues and very slow rendering of long pages (IMHO still caused by the link checking process, but I haven't validated that theory) as the two main causes of our dismal performance (that, and the fact that people like us too damn much). I had hoped that Tim's links update fix would make a big difference, but it turns out that saving long pages is still slow because they are also *displayed* after saving them, and it's the displaying itself that is slow. I don't really know how much of an impact the current 2394^34 pass parser has on the performance on Larousse, but I wouldn't rule that out as a cause of headaches either.
Regards,
Erik