Manual:$wgJobRunRate/en

Details
Number of jobs to perform per request. If set to a value between 0 and 1, jobs are performed or not performed based on probability. If set to a nonzero integer (1 or higher), that many jobs are performed per request. If set to 0, no jobs will be performed during ordinary apache requests. In this case,  should be run periodically.

Explanation
The job queue is designed to hold many short tasks. By default, each time a request runs, one job is taken from the job queue and executed. If the performance burden of this is too great, you can reduce $wgJobRunRate by putting something like this in your :

This will cause one item in the job queue to run on average every 100 page views. It is important to understand that this means that on every page view the probability of running a queued item is 1 in 100. This means that (in theory at least) you could still end up with one job being run every page impression, or (at the other end of the scale) no jobs being run at all. However, in practice, providing you have enough traffic to make a meaningful sample size, it should be about 1 per 100 requests.

In some versions of mediawiki, you can view the number of jobs at Special:Statistics. However, this number is a rough estimate, and thus misleading, so it was removed in 1.17.

The job queue is located in, function  (  before 1.23).