Yes I thought the actors volume was a lot more than it used to be as well. I typically prescrape my media with MediaCompanion to create NFOs and am sure to deselect actor scraping with that tool.
I guess I shouldn't wait too long to update my Windows // XBMC/Kodi // VoxCommando all at once, my roommate was out of town and I felt ambitious!
Hmm I just reran the query directly in mysql again and again its taking a long time. I wouldn't suggest altering the timeout too drastically as you suggest, perhaps optimizing this query will be more efficient, maybe I can ask some dba colleagues at work tomorrow.
I had to kill the query just now I would say it was taking over 2-3mins if it wasn't hung.
I just ran your original query and per mysql supposedly it took just 0.13 secs and I still cant reproduce how i managed to get the suggested query to return but when it did I reran it several times and after that it was much more akin to the response time of yours...odd.
UPDATE it just finished.... (6 min 29.32 sec) lol