Hi,
I address this issue as a non-techie. I have worked on some very link-heavy pages, such as the ones for the Academy Awards whose loading time increases with the addition of more data. 1. Is it likely that a technical solution will soon be found for the slow loading?
I'll try to look closer into it in the next few days, but I'd appreciate some help from the long-term developers. Another thing I'm currently trying to improve is the speed of the Orphaned Pages special, which takes an awful lot of time on my local install (possibly because of a missing index in the table).
2. Are there ways in which data could be better organized tominimize the effects of slow loading? 3. Should articles like the Academy Awards listings be broken down to more manageable sizes, and if so, how does one determine optimum sizes?
With the current software, it's simply a matter of the number of links. The more links, the slower the page will load. The volume of the actual text content does not matter. So you could try to break collections of links into different sections on separate pages.
But in general I am against such workarounds. We should try to improve the software ASAP. Do you think I could convert you into a developer? We need all the help we can get, and I'd be willing to teach as far as I understand.
Regards,
Erik