On 10/25/07, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Someone (User:froth) drastically reworked the implementation of the templates that construct the Reference Desk headers, and at just about the same time I started having all these problems. They were already pretty sophisticated and deeply nested, and from what he said about what he was up to, they're even more so now. I bet the server errors I (and the other Reference Desk users) have been getting *are* due to a timeout, not because of the time taken to upload these huge pages over my recently-flakey DSL connection, but rather, because of the time taken to interpolate and render all those templates...
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 according to Tamper Data. With the archives but not the header, it's just 6766 ms. Without either, it's 5836 ms. With both, it's 49430 ms.
I think the conclusion is clear: the header adds over 30 seconds to the page load time. It needs to be killed, stone-dead. This is the sort of thing that the wikitext include limit was supposed to prevent -- it seems not to be doing its job.