Well I'm an idiot - the fulltext index on page_text was missing from a default installation. It didn't break searches but probably slowed them down tremendously. Also set engine to MyISAM on page_text to avoid cryptic error messages from MySQL.

<?php

class Text_Wiki_Render_Plain extends Text_Wiki_Render {
    
    function pre()
    {
        return;
    }
    
    function post()
    {
        return;
    }
    
}
?>