2011/4/5 Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com:
So is the time spent with the actual expansion (replacing variables), or getting the wikitext for n-depth template recursion? Or is it the parser functions?
Well, getting the wikitext shouldn't be very expensive as it is cached in several cache layers. Basically it's just expanding many, many preprocessor nodes. A while ago I did a bit of testing with my template tool on dewiki[1] and found that wikimedia servers spend approx. 0.2 ms per expanded node part, although there's of course much variation depending on current load. My tool counts 303,905 nodes when expanding [[Barack Obama]] so that would account for about 60 s of render time. As already said, YMMV.
Paul Copperman
[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:P.Copp/scripts/templateutil.js, you can test it with javascript:void importScriptURI('http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=raw&title=Benutzer:P.Copp/scripts/templateutil.js&ctype=text/javascript') and a click on "Template tools" in the toolbox