Lee Daniel Crocker <lee(a)piclab.com> said: Was this a representative setup (e.g., with the full database)? If so, that sounds like removing link-checks won't help much - at least by itself and for single servers. Thanks for the info!! As I said, measuring is the only real answer, and I'm willing to accept "nope, wrong guess" as the answer. So turning to other ideas and performance measurements... The swapping overhead does suggest that an excessive use of memory by MySQL is resulting in the performance hit. Perhaps reducing the amount of data stored in MySQL (by moving the text of cur and old text into the filesystem and OUT of MySQL entirely). As another poster noted, the "old" text is an especially large database, but presumably only a few rare articles are actually read from "old". Obviously reading an article from the filesystem will read the data into memory too, but the underlying OS doesn't try to preload the entire filesystem into memory, which MySQL appears to be trying to do. Doing this will mean that archiving the encyclopedia would have to archive both the MySQL metadata and the article filesystem, but archiving a filesystem is a rather well-understood problem :-).