I had a brainwave about how the Recent Activity page is generated and it seems to work. The page is now re-created every five minutes and seems to do so without keeping the database occupied for ages like it used to. Fingers crossed it’ll keep working like this from now on.
There might be occasions when it lists fewer recent things on the page, depending on the distribution of where annotations are… but it’s certainly better than nothing.
(For the technically minded and interested… Previous versions of the page required joins between the database tables holding annotations and entries, and this was too much for the shared server to cope with without making temporary tables etc. In the most recent previous version of the page, this was taking a few minutes for each of the page’s four lists, and prevente any other queries on the annotations table (such as posting a new annotation). I realised I could get much the same data without any joins, and this takes seconds. Much simpler!)
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