[Wikitech-l] Performance of parsing links?

I'm writing a parser function extension that outputs about 5000 lines of text (an organizational chart of a company) as a nested, bulleted list.

* Bob the CEO ** Jane Jones ** Mike Smith *** etc.

It takes about 3 seconds (real time) for MediaWiki to render this list, which is acceptable. However, if I make it a list of links, which is more useful:

* [[User:Bob | Bob the CEO]] ** [[User:Jane | Jane Jones]] ** [[User:Mike | Mike Smith]]

the rendering time more than doubles to 6-8 seconds, which users perceive as too slow.

Is there a faster implementation for rendering a large number of links, rather than returning the wikitext list and having MediaWiki render it?

Thanks, DanB

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