On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 2:58 PM, Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw(a)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.