Jan writes:
Ultimately the best solution would be to have a table wanted(title, #pages) with an index on #pages (and a unique index on title), then MySQL wouldn't need to sort at all. I don't know of the top of my head if there are any other queries that depend on 'brokenlinks' but I don't believe so and if there are not then I would recommend replacing it.
I believe we need the full brokenlinks information in order to initialize the links table once a new article is written, so that "What links here" will immediately work for new articles.
Nevertheless, I think we should have a wanted table as above in addition. Space is really no issue, but time is, and Most Wanted is likely to be one of our more commonly called slow functions.
Axel