On 6/27/06, mdd4696(a)gmail.com <mdd4696(a)gmail.com> wrote: In principle, the worst possibility is a bit of extra slowness for a little while, as some pages have to be recached. If the pages are infrequently visited (as the vast majority of non-article space stuff is, comparatively--remember that there are far more readers than editors), then this slight extra slowness will be spread out over a longer period of time, becoming less noticeable. How much this extra slowness amounts to has never been calculated, to my knowledge; it could be so small as to be unnoticeable. And certainly an isolated edit is no problem: at worst, it's the load equivalent of making an edit to every page the template is included in, which wouldn't realistically increase the load on servers that handle something on the order of ten thousand page views a *second*. If there's any reasonable purpose served by editing the template, there's no reason to hesitate. If something puts too much load on the servers, the devs will edit the software so that you can't do it or it's not a problem; see, for instance, recategorizing templates (which is handled in a job queue rather than being executed right away) or transcluding templates in sigs (they're automatically substed). Devs handle the backend, don't worry about it.