In the last week, my script made 410 attempts at 20 minute intervals to reach the page http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/Chemistry Out of these, only 86% were served in less than 5 seconds. Five percent of the calls timed out (my limit is 60 seconds). Now, this is far better than the worst problems that Wikipedia saw in April or May, but it is still pretty miserable.

I believe the performance in the new code is much improved.

Even under all the load I can put on it with a T1 line, the beta software is producing average load times of less than 1.5 seconds.

A number of people are now working on stress testing this software before it is put into production. And I think there is a general commitment to solving the performance problem, and I see lots of movement in the right direction.