Elgg/community_plugins — comment on commit fc2f43f8a74294ad75d13cb442f4248834130890
File:  line 0
By cash:

You're welcome to look at the commit history to see my attempts to do this using Elgg's API. The normalization was an issue and the casting was an issue. I believe casting means the sort is not performed using an index - probably a temporary table.

I had originally thought I could cache the download counts to speed this up. It just didn't work.