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How many articles should your user be able to select, 1 or 2? If so, how would you do this? Checkboxs, Autocomplete (by title, by date)? How many articles would would your users be selecting from? If you have hundreds of articles then checkboxes or a multi-choice list might get out of hand. I know you nixed the flag module, but this is likely the route I would take if I was facing this issue.
This may sound odd, but I was able to resolve a very similar issue by switching from disabling dblog and switching to syslog. That and making sure cron was running every few minutes with caching for anonymous users made a huge difference in that 'initial page load'.
The Views module is likely what you're looking for to simplify this. You can easily gather the data you need into a single query and then them it appropriately.
