[zanny]

> clicking around a site, waiting for server responses, when nothing has changed

> flip the script and notify the client, rather than the client clicking around, uselessly consuming resources?

What are they clicking on that is being useless? Are you putting buttons on your page making requests for no reason?

When its server side you send them a mostly-static page with a bunch of links or submits to make more requests with. All those requests are for either sending data back or getting something new off the server. If your use case would involve a lot of user generated input in a streaming fashion then yes, SPA client side programs are th way to go, but if all you are doing is throwing mostly-static CRUD applications you aren't getting an efficiency advantage dumping all the data on the user at first request and then hoping to only get one response of everything they want changed later. You're burning a ton of client memory and CPU cycles to do work you could have done more efficiently with page caching on your end anyway.