Axel Boldt axel@uni-paderborn.de writes:

Right now, I'm seeing nice and fast responses, except every once in a while everything slows to a halt. If that's due to our script, then there must be some really bad, really rare special function somewhere. I doubt that.

Its a punt, and I've no real evidence ... but ... when the 'pedia comes back after some slowtime, there often seems to be an

Wikipedia:Unsuccessful searches (date); [Unsuccessful search for foobar]

at the top of RecentChanges

I might be imagining it, I certainly can't reproduce it at will.