You see? No need for a separate table of dangling
links, if you make sure
that every article comes into existance. Subqueries are really nice.
That's a bad idea, because often you will have articles with many links to
non-existent pages, which would all have to be created. This would blow
the CUR table out of proportion, with no real advantage.
Note that my impression is that the main reason the site is so slow is
simply that MySQL doesn't handle very large tables very well (maybe
subqueries would help here, I don't know). That's why we should try to
avoid making them bigger while we still use it.
Regards,
Erik