2011/4/5 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com:
For comparison: WYSIFTW parses [[Barak Obama]] in 3.5 sec on my iMac, and in 4.4 sec on my MacBook (both Chrome 12).
Yes, it doesn't do template/variable replacing, and it's probably full of corner cases that break; OTOH, it's JavaScript running in a browser, which should make it much slower than a dedicated server setup running precompiled PHP.
Seriously, the bulk of the time needed to parse these enwiki articles is for template expansion. If you pre-expand them, taking care that also the templates in <ref>...</ref> tags get expanded, MediaWiki can parse the article in a few seconds, 3-4 on my laptop.