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Would restarting any of the servers periodically help?

Suppose it takes X minutes to restart a server, and that the "lag" problem puts Wikipedia out of operation for Y minutes -- where X << Y. Maybe then this would be a good "band-aid" for the problem.

It takes all of a couple seconds to restart apache; I've set it to do a "graceful" restart every half hour during US daytime, which more or less coincides with our peak hours.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Does restarting apache also untangle the gridlock of database queries?

Ed Poor