Nick-
Pliny seems to be the cause of the current slowness, seems we're running low on memory again, although I can't say for sure why this is the case... (heavy swapping, low CPU util...)
What I notice is that whenever the Wikipedia is slow, I see several threads like this in the PROCESSLIST:
SELECT cur_id,cur_namespace,cur_title,cur_text FROM cur,searchindex WHERE cur_id=si_page AND ( (MATCH (si_title) AGAINST ('tautology')) ) AND cur_namespace IN (0) LIMIT 0, 20
usually with running times of several hundred seconds. This is the title search. The main title search is still disabled, but the Go button still runs one. There are no similar threads for the non-English wiki, which suggests (to me, at least) that something is seriously wrong with one of the concerned tables after the crash. Either that, or we're running into big scaling problems of the above query. I've already done a REPAIR TABLE SEARCHINDEX to no avail.
Regards,
Erik