On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 3:04 AM, Alex Brollo alex.brollo@gmail.com wrote:
Just another question about resources. I can get the same result with an AJAX call or with a #lst (labeled section transclusion) call. Which one is lighter for servers in your opinion? Or - are they they more or less similar?
Fewer HTTP requests is better, all else being equal. I don't know how LST works, but I imagine it's more efficient than doing a whole API call. (Although maybe not, for instance if the API is caching things and LST isn't.)
Overall, I'd advise you to do whatever minimizes user-visible latency. That directly improves things for your users, and is a decent proxy for server resource use. So use whichever method takes less time to fully render. This is rather more practical than trying to consult MediaWiki developers about every detail of your program's implementation, which is unlikely to be used widely enough to greatly affect server load anyway, and even if it were we couldn't necessarily give intelligent answers without knowing exactly what the program is doing and why.