I would be for that. And I think that could be done rather cheaply by just determining the top 1000 nodes of all time only once a day or so. If it were plain mod_perl, I would just store the id's of those 1000 in an array at a server start time (before forking) and randomly select from that from memory without ever touching the disk. It would only make startup a little longer, but would not affect runtime in general.

Liz