Fugliness

You're right that it's not the major cause, but if I was a DBA on a system taking 1/3s to return this little content.... I'd be concerned. Is that the only call getting content? Remember - I know nothing about MW but loadContent seems to take a while too.

I know MySQL is only an open source database, not a proper product, but I wouldn't expect a database to be taking this long over a simple query based on a very few params.

The db stuff is much less than that actually - I'll have to insert more profiling calls to figure out why loadcontent takes so long (I have an idea), but the actual db access is in Revision::loadText, which is only 0.088 seconds. The profiling info also contains all the database queries, but I didn't write them down - they were really quick, so it's definitely not the database. And even 0.3 seconds is relatively small compared to the total.

True, but I hope you're right that the DB stuff is less than 0.3s - it should be (essentially) zero for a system of this size.

I'm not trying to annoy here, but please just take a look at the indexing anyway? Yes, it's mainly down to the parser, but every little helps.