I find it very disturbing that it still took 47 seconds to retrieve the single element, and that this: /mediawiki/siteinfo still took about 8 seconds.
True, that sounds slow.. Although I guess it's still faster than most other implementations available out there. Of course that's not reason enough to keep it like that. Currently, however, some other todos have more priority..
I believe this premise should be challenged. Surely the performance issue above would be solved if indeed there were more specific indices to particular elements. I don't think it's unreasonable to at least permit such an index to be created optionally.
Again, I agree that an optional index might be a nice addition, but it takes some time to implement it (and, by experience, using positional predicates will often do the trick as well). Btw, everyone is free to contribute to our project by either branching and extending our code, or speeding up the development of certain features by supporting us financially (which some people have done already)..
Thanks, Christian