Wiki page list is extremely slow to generate

Summary

The Wiki page list is extremely slow to generate.

Steps to reproduce

Create a project. Push https://gitlab.com/bgamari/ghc-wiki to the wiki. Access the wiki pages list (e.g. https://gitlab.staging.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/pages).

Example Project

https://gitlab.com/bgamari/ghc-wiki/wikis/git_access

Note that this is not a large Wiki, being significantly pared-down from the full GHC wiki.

What is the current bug behavior?

The page takes nearly 10 seconds to load.

What is the expected correct behavior?

The page should load nearly instantly.

Relevant logs and/or screenshots

None.

Output of checks

This happens on gitlab.com

Possible fixes

It's not terribly clear. I tried viewing the same Wiki outside of GitLab with Gollum (which I understand is what GitLab's wiki uses internally) and found that the pages list loads nearly instantly (in around 200 ms). Consequently I think we can rule out Gollum and this Rugged issue (as suggested in #57067 (closed))

I have found that the biggest contributor to the load time is not the number of pages but rather the number of commits in the repository. The reproduction above has been modified to squash most of the Wiki's history. Consequently there are only ~1000 commits instead of the 17000 which are in the full, unabridged history. When given the full history the pages list fails to load entirely. This is surprising as it shouldn't be necessary to traverse the revision history of the wiki to generate the page list.