For comparison: WYSIFTW parses [[Barak Obama]] in 3.5 sec on my iMac, and in 4.4 sec on my MacBook (both Chrome 12).
Try parsing [[Barack Obama]], 4s spent on parsing a redirect page is quite a lot (albeit it has some vandalism) OTOH, my macbook shows raw wikitext pretty much immediately. Parser is definitely the issue.
Domas