Re:I can only think that modern front end development has fa...
by Izkata on Sunday April 04, 2021 @11:11PM
(#26694936)
> They think that server side is slower because you have to send down more data, or you have to wait for the server to generate HTML.
> Quite the contrary, it's slower to send down 1 MB or 10 MB of JavaScript to render a page, than to simply send down a 100 KB HTML page. Even if you need some JS also, browsers know how to render concurrently with downloads, as long as you provide enough HTML.
The argument I remember from years ago used "slower" as a bad simplification. What it actually meant was, doing the rendering server-side wasted CPU the server could be using to respond to another request. Instead, just send the data and distribute some of this processing to all your users by way of client-side rendering.
Also, back then bundling was a lot rarer than it is now, so the large libraries that made of most of those 10 MB javascript files would be separate files the browser can keep cached.
> Quite the contrary, it's slower to send down 1 MB or 10 MB of JavaScript to render a page, than to simply send down a 100 KB HTML page. Even if you need some JS also, browsers know how to render concurrently with downloads, as long as you provide enough HTML.
The argument I remember from years ago used "slower" as a bad simplification. What it actually meant was, doing the rendering server-side wasted CPU the server could be using to respond to another request. Instead, just send the data and distribute some of this processing to all your users by way of client-side rendering.
Also, back then bundling was a lot rarer than it is now, so the large libraries that made of most of those 10 MB javascript files would be separate files the browser can keep cached.