[WikiEN-l] Grinding to a halt?

[Poor, Edmund W]

Taku made a suggestion I've been mulling over: 

Can we find out how much performance is affected 
by checking for broken links?

I personally don't care most of the time whether 
a link is "real" or "broken". It's only when I'm 
actively editing an article that I need to know this.

And anyway, isn't there a way to CACHE some of 
this real/broken info in my browser?

Take what I did yesterday, on one of my rare weekend 
editing sessions. I was trying to straighten out 
links and naming for a few of the recent mikado 
(i.e., Japanese emperors). I kept having to refresh 
the page to check whether certain links were present,
simply because I couldn't remember. But I bet my 
browser knew.

Anyway, before I go off half-cocked, let me ask this:

What percent of processor time (or disk access time 
or whatever) goes into maintaining the redness or 
blueness of all those links?

A) If it's a tiny percentage, then forget I ever posted 
   this (return from interrupt!)
B) If it's more than half, I'd say we better look into
   this.

Give the user an option to turn off broken-link-checking, 
when they so choose? Only if it would remove an 
appreciable amount of load from the server.

----

Sorry, but I didn't have time to polish this draft 
(time is pressing), but I hope you get the idea: look 
for where the bulk of the time goes, and try to reduce 
that time expenditure.

Uncle Ed
Lazy Developer, Wikipedia