[aoe]

I'm guessing the recent comments widget is just doing an ORDER BY date DESC LIMIT 10 or something? With an index on date, I don't see how this could be slow.

How long does the query take?

How many rows do you have?

[ashray]

Appears that he has 188590 rows. It definitely sounds like a configuration issue. Maybe the mysql table cache might be bogged down or the query cache is full or malfunctioning. Could be a lot of things.

Sorting that into a temp table, and caching that in memory would be really fast on a server with reasonable RAM and proper indexes.

[jacques_chester]

InnoDB helps a lot. MyISAM likes to perform joins on disk if a table has a TEXT field ... even if you're not using that field in your query.