Last modified: 2009-12-29 14:29:47 UTC
It seems that opening multiple tabs of Special:MostLinked pages and repeatedly refreshing them causes the site to crash. I heard about this from some person in an IRC channel and after trying it myself it made the site unaccessible for few minutes. This applies to all users of the site. My guess is that the software somehow hangs while trying to compose a list of most linked pages. Wikipedia, homever, has blocked this special page from being accessed.
Special:Mostlinked is an expensive special page, and generating it is stressful for the database. If your wiki is large or if there are many generation attempts going on at the same time, the slowness you described can happen. You can set $wgMiserMode = true; to disable such expensive features; you can then use the updateSpecialPages.php maintenance script to periodically update these pages rather than having them regenerated every time someone views them.
