Hi,

I already wrote about this issue here: http://mail.wikipedia.org/ pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-January/033518.html

The problem - messages on default skin include project name, and the inclusion costs milliseconds. I didn't do proper profiling now, but it may consume up to 20% of time required to push out a simple page.

The easy immediate cure for any site is to check that there're no transformations happening in these messages:

mediawiki:aboutpage mediawiki:privacypage mediawiki:disclaimerpage mediawiki:aboutsite mediawiki:pagetitle

As for mediawiki development, the urls may point to Project: (what would be rewritten into proper project namespace afterwards), or have $wgSitename used in Message files... Message transformations matter in many other cases, but those at least are not triggered on every page load.

I guess this doesn't matter that much with Tim's new Skin rendering engine, but I can't tell now, :)

Cheers, Domas