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 ::::In my URL link above, I set the limit to 999999 and got between 5000 and 6000 articles for each date I tried.  The results came back fairly quickly.  From my database experience, I don't think overstating the max causes any real extra work for the server.  The server will stop retrieving data once everything is retrieved.  Setting the limit to 9999 (or 10000 if you prefer) would produce the same result with the same amount of server load.  It might be worth asking the database folks though. 
 By the way, I don't think the loop that looks for bare month links is needed.  All of the dates that we are unlinking will have a month-day combination link.   / "