Simetrical wrote:
Yes, those load bog-slowly. I tested WP:RD/S. If I leave in the header, but remove the archives, it loads in 40191 ms on preview...
Thanks for the confirmation.
At [[Wikipedia talk:Reference desk#update]], someone is claiming that at [[Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#any work on the incredible sluggishness of deeply edited articles?]], someone is claiming that the problem has nothing to do with page size or template transclusion, but rather, with the length of an article's history list. I don't believe this for a minute, but if it's a rumor with legs I suppose we'll be hearing it for a while...
Tonight I'm going to temporarily dyke the header out of one of the Reference Desks and see how quickly it refreshes then. That should lay the question to rest (for the Reference Desks, at least...).