One of the things I found was that the present query for Wanted pages counts only the distinct pages with a broken link to the wanted page, even if that page has two or more broken links to the same title. It seems to me that's not important--I'd just as soon have it count all links so I know how many to fix, and that's just as good a metric of "wantedness", I think. And it's not very different in any case-- multiple broken links to the same title on one page are rare.
Changing it to count all links speeds it up quite a bit (from 30-40 seconds to 6-7). Also, I'm throwing away all wanted pages with only a single link--that reduces the size of the temp file needed for sorting by number of links. If we ever get to the point where those will be useful, we'll make a feature for them.
At any rate, tell me if you either of those changes is a real problem. 0