-Is ikiwiki taking too long to build your wiki? Read on for some common
-problems that can be avoided to make ikiwiki run quick.
+Ikiwiki is a wiki compiler, which means that, unlike a traditional wiki,
+all the work needed to display your wiki is done up front. Where you can
+see it and get annoyed at it. In some ways, this is better than a wiki
+where a page view means running a program to generate the page on the fly.
+
+But enough excuses. If ikiwiki is taking too long to build your wiki,
+let's fix that. Read on for some common problems that can be avoided to
+make ikiwiki run quick.
[[!toc]]
+(And if none of that helps, file a [[bug|bugs]]. One other great thing about
+ikiwiki being a wiki compiler is that it's easy to provide a test case when
+it's slow, and get the problem fixed!)
+
## rebuild vs refresh
Are you building your wiki by running a command like this?
problem got in the habit of running `ikiwiki -setup my.setup` by hand
when their wiki was small, and found it got slower as they added pages.
-### use the latest version
+## use the latest version
If your version of ikiwiki is not [[!verison]], try upgrading. New
optimisations are frequently added to ikiwiki, some of them yielding
*enormous* speed increases.
-### expensive inlines
+## expensive inlines
Do you have an archive page for your blog that shows all posts,
using an inline that looks like this?