@Flibbles and @TW_Tones I think the Relink delay problem has been partially solved.
I didn’t think it was the large number of tiddlers that was causing the Relink problem because before I updated to 5.3.3 I had the same number of tiddlers and no Relink problem.
And I didn’t know how to begin investigating which of my modifications to my wiki was clashing with the update to cause the problem because I hadn’t kept track over the years and didn’t know where to find them.
With my own wiki so messed up, I thought it was as good a time as any to try switching over to a completely different edition, the beautiful Timimi site.
But asking the question how to import all my non-system tiddlers into another tiddlywiki CleverNote (the 1.0.49 version at the Timimi site) got me thinking again - Why not try that with the standard empty.html to solve this problem here?
Previously I only knew how to update my tiddlywiki the standard way - dragging it onto the update page. It never occurred to me that It was possible to download an empty.html first and then export all my non-system tiddlers over to it, thus getting rid of all my modifications at once.
Once I realized there was this alternative way to update, I searched in this forum for exporting non-system tiddlers and this came up: Simplest way to port tiddlers to a new TiddlyWiki where Telumire says:
You can be more selective by exporting your tiddlers with the advanced search, you could write
[all[tiddlers]!is[system]]
for example to only get non system tiddlers, then export in json. To import the tiddlers in the new wiki, drag and drop the json.
I had had no idea all these years that was what one did with jsons - drag and drop them like plugins. I remember one time laboriously opening up a json and trying to recreate it in my wiki ^o^ >_< (Or make a tiddler and put the json contents inside or something.) If I ever did know at one time, I must have promptly forgotten it.
Now I have this broad idea that a json is just code for a bunch of tiddlers, like a plugin. And @TW_Tones, now I can understand more of your tips here.
So did this alternative way of updating and sloughing off all mods solve the Relink problem?
Well so far, now I only have the Relink problem on the first tiddler of the session. After that, relinking is snappy! I can live with that!
Now I will import all the rest of the plugins and mods again as I feel or discover that I need them and update you on any changes.
Thank you both for all the help.