Brion,
Thank you for posting the queries which each page view request triggers. These might be optimized somewhat, as you suggested.
I'm ever more concerned, though, with the pauses of 10 seconds or more -- some even lasting several minutes! -- during which no access to the Wikipedia is possible at all.
Are these "no access" periods due to the page view queries? I thought the delays were caused rather by table locks.
In my experience with MS SQL Server 6.5 (and above), mere read-only queries do not cause table locking. Rather, it is only update queries which lock tables -- especially when performed within a "transaction".
Ed Poor