Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance
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When making some improvement to Wikipedia's content, such as editing a page, reorganising a category, or modifying a template, the impact on Wikipedia's servers is the last thing you should be worrying about. When the time comes that some common practice is having a negative impact on the servers' ability to provide access, the developers will step in. They worry about the servers' performance so we don't have to.
Some quotes from developers:
Site operations and keep-alive stuff is our concern. "Our" refers to
the development team and the system administration team, but I lump it all together for this. If something is *needed* in order to get on with the encyclopaedia-writing, or the dictionary-making, then do it. If it's unclean, let us know, and if there's an easier method we can implement to help, we will.
Adopt common sense, of course. If it's plain something could cause drastic problems, hold fire and check. But don't go running around screaming "teh servers, teh servers!!!" as an excuse to not do stuff,
that's stupid.
— Rob Church, Wikien-L, 27 Jun 06
A large image uses more disk space, takes more bandwidth when transferred at full size, and requires more resources when being resized. It takes no more resources to refer to an already existing image of large size other than the network transfer.
Generally, you should not worry much about little things like templates and "server load" at a policy level. If they're expensive, we'll either fix it or restrict it at a technical level; that's our responsibility.