Lately, visiting Drupal.org has been a painful experience, with horrendous load times and frequent timeout related errors. As of today, the site feels zippy again, yay! What made the difference? New hardware? Extra memory? New exotic caching? Nope. The optimization of one query, the one that returns the "recent posts" is to thank. And who came through with this miracle elixir? David Strauss of Four Kitchen Studios (who paid him to work on the problem all day!)

(Thanks also go to dww, webchick, killes, FiReaNG3L, pwolanin and a bunch of others. It was a team effort in the end.)