I finished working on the speedup for now. Some of my test data (Athlon 1800):
ab -n100 -c8 (for the Biology article): * uncached: ca. 11 requests/sec. * cached: ca. 20 requests/sec.
This is about 20% faster compared to what I started with this morning.
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.
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.
Everyone, please test the changes I made (especially the login procedure) for bugy, so Jimbo can use the current version ASAP.
Magnus