Are there any alternatives to just turning it off? I'm hoping perhaps it could be run less often (e.g. once a month) instead, or something?

In T121949#1893826, @Quiddity wrote:

Are there any alternatives to just turning it off? I'm hoping perhaps it could be run less often (e.g. once a month) instead, or something?

One alternative mentioned by JCrespo in T120895#1875104 is to increase the time limit on the server. I'm not sure a lot of people would be supporting that.
I'd try and talk to Aaron and other folks to see if this query can be optimized better somehow to make it run faster.
In the meantime though we should turn it off because the query not running means that the Total users column won't be updated either. And new gadgets won't show up as well.

I suspect the only real solution is fixing T54777.

In T121949#1893826, @Quiddity wrote:

Are there any alternatives to just turning it off? I'm hoping perhaps it could be run less often (e.g. once a month) instead, or something?

In theory, we could update it like we do other cached query pages

https://github.com/wikimedia/operations-puppet/blob/production/modules/mediawiki/manifests/maintenance/updatequerypages.pp

Change 264961 had a related patch set uploaded (by Kaldari):
Disable active user gadget stats on testwiki (in preparation for enwiki)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/264961

Change 264961 merged by jenkins-bot:
Disable active user gadget stats on testwiki (in preparation for enwiki)

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/264961

Change 265185 had a related patch set uploaded (by Kaldari):
Disable active gadget user stats on enwiki since it takes too long

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/265185

Change 265185 merged by jenkins-bot:
Disable active gadget user stats on enwiki since it takes too long

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/265185