Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-10090661-20140329025805/@comment-957747-20140403190223

I will try to step in here and explain the issue and what I have done so far to attempt to alleviate the issue.

Due to site load issues on Dragon City Wiki, we had to blank a page on the wikia causing huge nested template calls. In some cases, these calls are still being used, but the main template, Template:Dragon Content, was calling these templates multiple times causing huge server-side lag retreiving all this information.

Dragon City Wiki was using one huge template (over 180k) to house data on all dragons in the game (over 250). This template is a huge multi-switch template and is very slow. The output of a call to this template outputs one specific piece of data on one dragon out of the 5,768 line template. This template was being called several times via Template:Dragon Content.

To alleviate this approach, I suggested that the wikia break down the information into smaller bits that can be retrieved via DPL. I broke down the template and added a new namespace (Data:) to house this information on a per-dragon basis. My test/sandbox was done on Dujur Dragon (data template at Data:Dujur Dragon).

The other issue is that most of the wikia's template that grab this information all depend on Template:Data/Dragons and is called multiple times per page (as many as ~75) to get all the information needed. One call, by itself, can take a few seconds.

The ideal solution here is to remove the dependancy on Template:Data/Dragons(whatlinkshere) completely and move all this data to the Data: namespace with the same name as the dragon it houses data on. Then rewrite the templates that rely on Template:Data/Dragons to use DPL to retrieve the information instead. This flow of information will be much faster and will kill the multi-threaded template to template to template calls to return one bit of information.

I can be contacted directly or here if there are any questions.