erik_moeller(a)gmx.de (Erik Moeller) declared: Thanks!! Well, at least a few measurements to determine if it _IS_ a bottleneck would help. If the Wikipedia can be made to run efficiently with link checking, then link checking should be left in. I'm not against link checking, per se. It's just that link checking is less important than having a running Wikipedia. Faster hardware will probably help, but software solutions are still worth pursuing. A hardware speedup of 2x won't be enough if usage increases 20x. Other alternatives include storing the "current" text - or even ALL text - in the filesystem, using special filenames so that MySQL doesn't need to be consulted (or only consulted a little) for certain common queries. It could store either the original wiki text, or the HTML'ized versions, or both. MySQL is actually a pretty good SQL database. However, it's optimized for serving structured data. The underlying OS has received FAR more optimization work to find and retrieve unstructured data, and it also has more information available to it so it can swap/drop information more efficiently. As was noted elsewhere, if old text is stored in the filesystem, it would reduce the memory usage of MySQL substantially. If all text were stored in the filesystem, MySQL would then primarily be used for metadata storage and search index uses (if search is on). Anyway, I'm just typing ideas, hoping that some are useful. My real goal is that I don't want the Wikipedia to be a victim of its own success :-). A solution that works is, by definition, a good solution :-).