Forum:Lag on Recent Changes?

Throughout the last weeks, I've noticed a severe lag on our Special:RecentChanges page. I've just tested that using a debugger, and found that getting our RC (last 50 edits, nothing special; just the page HTML itself without other resources) often takes up to 14,000(!) milli-seconds, more than 13,000 of which are spent idling, waiting for a response.

The RC page of MA/de takes much less than that, about 1,600 milli-seconds on average. Other pages on MA/en are served "fast enough" as well, so it doesn't seem to be a Wikia (or even general MA) problem but one with our RC page specifically(DPL comes to mind). Is anyone else noticing this as well? -- Cid Highwind 13:13, January 8, 2012 (UTC)
 * Might it be worth removing the DPL and trying the same experiment? If it is the DPL, perhaps we split those things off to another location instead... -- sulfur 13:21, January 8, 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, good idea. :) Blanking the whole section made our RC load as fast as that of MA/de, and then reintroducing some of the template calls that contain a DPL changed nothing. It seems to be Template:Pages needing citation that is the culprit here. Changing its call to not use "randomcount" on the whole list made it a little better, but loading times were still in the 8-12 seconds range. Even changing its call to completely resemble that of Template:Featured article candidates didn't help much, so I guess it is the size of the category (<10 vs. >300) that matters here. I've disabled that listing for the moment, and we should discuss whether we need it on RC at all. -- Cid Highwind 14:32, January 8, 2012 (UTC)
 * If we're serious about this, then it probably doesn't need to be on the RC, but the editing portal is the only page I know of that always has some serious lag when compared to the rest of the site. That said, MA seems to always be slower than any other wiki I visit, regardless of who is hosting. This has been mentioned to me by others users a few times as well, so I'm pretty sure it isn't just on my end. - 16:54, January 8, 2012 (UTC)

I think that having to wait for 13 seconds (more for the complete load including resources) is not just "serious lag", but borders on "unusable" - even more if the part that makes it laggy is just a minor thing, anyway (why just pna-cite, not all pna, or current deletions?), and apparently not really used at all (or else we shouldn't have piled up more than 300 pna-cites). I'm currently working through those incites, and am removing stuff to the talk page that hasn't been properly cited for a good period of time (and could use some help, if anyone is interested). Perhaps we can return that feature later, if it works quickly enough at that point. -- Cid Highwind 17:07, January 8, 2012 (UTC)


 * I try to remove a handful of incites every now and then, but its hard to make much of a dint as one person. ;-) Glad to have you aboard Cid. You might find this list handy.–Cleanse ( talk 01:16, January 9, 2012 (UTC)