Magnus Manske wrote:
The real time killer is the {{NUMBEROFARTICLES}} variable on the main page. Its use increases the time per page by a factor of about 10! Only a change of the database can help here.
Of course, this is a fairly useless feature anyway. I think it should be removed! Speed is far more important than cute features. We could have a cron job calculate the number of articles every night, or every week, and post it on a plain old text file publicly accessible, and people who want to do it could go there to look up the latest number and update the homepage from time to time.
Another thing that takes a lot of time is the headed or the Recent Changes page. I guess since all the links there have to be checked every time the page is displayed, it increases the load on the database quite a bit. On my (short) local Recent Changes page, the header text alone is responsible for about 20% of the total rendering time. We should probably force the Recent Changes page *not* to look for existing articles in the header text.
If a page appears on RecentChanges, doesn't that automatically imply that the page exists? So why do we need to check all the links there? If we in some rare cases show a page there as if it exists, when it does not, what's the harm?
If I don't hear about any showstoppers from the other developers, I'll upgrade to this version later tonight or tomorrow morning.
--Jimbo