Ward switched to using his project, Smallest Federated Wiki, which basically doesn't do a thing without JS.
In fact, if I remember correctly, the slow load times are because it loads the entire wiki tree in the background to make linking easier for the engine... But a worse experience for the user.
Spinner loads instantly for me. Everything else takes ~10 seconds.
I'm on a 250 megabit connection. I haven't seen a page take this long to load in months.
Once a particular page is visited, it does load quickly. But for new ones it's always the same experience. Unless they're buckling under load of some kind and this provides a fancy cache, it's pretty ridiculous.
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edit: decided to watch the network on a new page, http://wiki.c2.com/?LiterateProgramming for instance. Most everything downloaded in 10s of milliseconds, but the LiterateProgramming XHR request sat waiting for 6.5 seconds. Maybe they are struggling for some reason?
