WordPress admin list of pages section hangs

[heroic]

We recently imported 0.2 millions pages into our wordpress site, and the admin section for pages became unusable. I retraced the issue to the fact that wordpress happily makes queries at certain places which are not "limit"ed.

Here's one example in wp-admin/includes/post.php:

        if ( is_post_type_hierarchical( $post_type ) && !isset($orderby) ) {
                $query['orderby'] = 'menu_order title';
                $query['order'] = 'asc';
                $query['posts_per_page'] = -1;
                $query['posts_per_archive_page'] = -1;
                $query['fields'] = 'id=>parent';               
        }

[birgire]

Welcome to WordPress core trac.

This seems to have been reported here #9864.

So I'm closing this one for now. You're welcome to join that ticket or reopen this one, if this is a different issue.