2011/1/11 Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+wikilist@gmail.comSimetrical%2Bwikilist@gmail.com
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.
I'm already using your suggestion, today I replaced a complex test template from our village pump (replacing it with a link to a subpage, visited by interested users only) and, really, the difference in rendering the page village pump page was obviuos.
Probably the best is, to use any trick together, paying much more attention to widely used templates and frequently parsed pages than to exotic, rarely used ones. Unluckily for servers, the worse, heavier pages often are the most frequently parsed and parsed again too.. as "village pump" ones; nevertheless they are the most useful for community, so they deserve some servers load.
Nevertheless... sometime people tells me "don't us this hack, it is server overloading"... sometimes it isn't, or simply it is a undocumented, unproofed personal opinion.
Alex