lag

[ubertuna-1]

Wesnoth takes a long time the first time after you install a new content, especially on Windows where it tend to be more critical.
This is normal, the first time you install a new content it rebuilds your cache, parsing all your installed addons. This might be especially slow for multiplayer addons since they all share the same cache.
But the time after, it should be quite fast (that's what the cache is for).

This might be what is wrong... I had just installed the campaign "A New Order" 14.5 mb :/ I beat it yesterday and proptly deleted it as it had been causing a bug that made autosaves fail to load. The error message said that side 2 had tried to recall units but it did not have a recall list and the game could not load :/ I logged on to the server just now and it only took about a minute so I am geussing that my problem has been fixed.

[Yogibear]

This should get much better if you reduce the number of multiplayer add-ons for your installation. Maybe there are some scenarios or eras you don't need any longer? I got extended era and a few survival scenarios installed and that's reasonably fast.

That's a temporary workaround, but IMO this is still a significant bug - additional content shouldn't slow down the game much at all.

Is there a way to speed up Wesnoth's WML-parsing? Or is the bottleneck somewhere else?

You are right, parsing the WML is what takes all the time. And yes, there is a way (at least i think so, the idea has not been deeply evaluated yet). What i am thinking about is doing parsing "on demand", that is when the unit for example first is being "touched".

Unfortunately this touches code spread all over the application, tedious to find and a lot of work to implement. This is what made me stay away from it so far. But the idea is still there and maybe if i find some time... - who knows .