On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 2:58 PM, Roan Kattouw roan.kattouw@gmail.com wrote:
This is true if, indeed, all parsing is done on the distant wiki. However, if parsing is done on the home wiki, you're not simply requesting data that's ready-baked in the DB and API calls make sense.
That's true -- if parsing is done on the foreign wiki, then you'd have to do API calls or something, not read from the DB. Another reason to avoid that. :)
I'm also not convinced this would be a huge performance problem because it'd only be done on parse (thanks to parser cache), but like you I trust Tim's verdict more than mine.
Templates will often miss the parser cache, because different invocations will use different parameters. Even *with* the parser cache, parsing is *still* one of the most expensive operations Wikimedia does, so I'm not so sanguine.