IIRC, DISTINCT does not use index on MySQL 4 and does a full scan.
Since live use some MySQL 5 version ... We should be fine :-)
Don't computers suck?
Resetting to new, you might want to force the index use. In bug 29287, the query does not seem to use repo_path index. See comment 7 : https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29287#c7
Follow up on bug report :)
Resolved by r89645.