User blog comment:Rappy 4187/Technical Update: November 9, 2015/@comment-4129195-20151109221605/@comment-126761-20151109222627

Indirect updates (like red links turning into blue links when a page is created) rely on the 'jobqueue' - essentially, updates like these are queued up to be run through at a steady pace. This avoids load spikes, but does mean some updates can take a little while - minutes to hours, generally.

Direct updates (like editing a page) bypass this, causing an immediate update of the rendered article.