Based on some ideas in An over-abundance of triggered updates, I’m experimenting with a StaleWidget that prevents content from being refreshed all the time.
Widgets can contain other widgets and macros, and each widget has a refresh() method that is responsible for refreshing the widget and its children. This is called on most keypresses and clicked links in TiddlyWiki.
All StaleWidget does is return false from refresh(), so that the content is never refreshed! To refresh the contents, you would have to close and reopen – or possibly fold and unfold – the tiddler.
I have wrapped my backlinks and freelinks footer with this, and the performance penalty for having many open tiddlers has almost disappeared.