On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 3:04 AM, Alex Brollo <alex.brollo(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Just another question about resources. I can get the
same result with an
AJAX call or with a #lst (labeled section transclusion) call. Which one is
lighter for servers in your opinion? Or - are they they more or less
similar?
Fewer HTTP requests is better, all else being equal. I don't know how
LST works, but I imagine it's more efficient than doing a whole API
call. (Although maybe not, for instance if the API is caching things
and LST isn't.)
Overall, I'd advise you to do whatever minimizes user-visible latency.
That directly improves things for your users, and is a decent proxy
for server resource use. So use whichever method takes less time to
fully render. This is rather more practical than trying to consult
MediaWiki developers about every detail of your program's
implementation, which is unlikely to be used widely enough to greatly
affect server load anyway, and even if it were we couldn't necessarily
give intelligent answers without knowing exactly what the program is
doing and why.