[WikiEN-l] Effect on the parser of large navboxes

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 6:55 PM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
> And I don't know how I ever missed this:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Overlink_crisis
>
> It really is worth reading all that essay and its talk page.

Make sure you read the history too, where I removed all the bogus
technical claims three different times over the span of a few months
before giving up when Wikid77 re-added them a fourth time.  All the
claims that links per se are a significant technical problem are
complete garbage.  The links tables are large, but not any kind of
bottleneck.  The thing that makes parsing slow is massive amounts of
wikitext, whether it's links or anything else.  Deeply nested
templates might be a particular performance issue, for instance, but
links table storage is definitely not.  But I've given up on trying to
keep Wikid77's persistently uninformed arguments off that page.

On Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 10:03 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> If navboxes could be loaded dynamically, with AJAX, then editors could
> put as many links in them as they liked without DoSing the servers.

AJAX would lead to a poorer user experience, since they'd take some
time to open.  Wouldn't it make much more sense to have some kind of
HTML-level cache for templates?  Normally you can't do that, because
wikitext constructs might start and end in different templates.  But
perhaps templates could opt in to an HTML cache through a magic word
to get improved performance, at the expense of behaving somewhat
differently.  This should work for the giant static navigation
templates as long as they don't vary per-article in important ways.
Although of course, you'd need someone who understands the parser to
write the feature, while AJAX could be done by any Wikipedia editor
who knows some JavaScript.

(This is clearly more of a wikitech-l discussion, though.)