It helped
Not just restarting the server.
I still had the maximum execution time for the PHP scripts set to 10 minutes, I used that to upgrade this blog when still on 512 Mb. Now I’m at 1.5 Gb, I upgraded the Tracks blog as well, using the same setting; but that database is significantly smaller than this one, so it finished well within this timespan. But I forgot to reset this parameter.
So that has been reset as well.
This may, or may not have contributed to the low performance, but there were quite a lot of worker processes that ran PHPWASD: (which is the 5.2.13 version of PHPWASD.EXE) within a far higher memory demand than I’ve seen before, it is possible.
Anyway, though not lightning fast, it is better than yesterday.
I’ve seen on the Wordprsss site that there is a program (plugin?) that creates static pages from posts; it comes with Apache’s MOD-REWRITE settings, It may be useful, so I’ll give it a try. The challenge will be to translate MOD-REWRITE to mapping in WASD :).