Link/Anchor Tags Generate Slowly - Link Checker Already Disabled
I'm looking at speeding up a component that just prints a large amount of <a> tags for a menu. Originally it took 70ms to generate this component which didn't make sense to me since this was just calling out.write() on a cached string. I disabled link checker in the component using the setIgnoreExternals and setIgnoreInternals methods and this got me down to around 15ms. This is much better but still accounts for almost half of our page generation time (locally). On a hunch i changed all of the <a href".."> tags to <span href=".."> and this dropped the generation time to 5ms. Is there anything else happening within CQ that would cause <a> tags to render slower than another tag? I'm using the CQ timing component to get the generation times.
Thanks