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by martinald 1312 days ago
The problem isn't the amount of data but the number of round trips required to get it.

Imagine you need to do the following calls to get the page rendered with the various information different parts of the page has:

1. Get user information

2. Get projects for user

3. Get the selected project

Now, if this was all server side rendered, it might take 1ms to go to the database and get the various bits of info, or 3ms for 3 sequential requests.

With a react app and say 250ms of latency to the database, you're looking at 750ms of overhead - 200x slower.

Of course you can architect all your APIs to always return everything the user needs so they don't have to do multiple requests, but that has its own drawbacks and honestly is very difficult to do and plan ahead for, especially at scale with multiple consumers of various APIs.
2 comments
lomereiter 1312 days ago
What you describe is solved with GraphQL, which is a very mature technology by now.
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ronnier 1312 days ago
Now we are in the world of graphql, react (and all the other stuff that comes to react), plus the backend server and language. It's a complicated world and I'm not sure we really need that much complexity. There are times when it is needed but I think we've over done it in some cases where we can just have a golang or ruby backend server that renders the page server side. I recently did this and it's a very good feeling just sticking to my server side language that I use daily + html.
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lomereiter 1312 days ago
Who are these 'we'? It's all up to personal preference in the end. As Github demonstrates by postponing SPA framework adoption, there are enough companies out there that share your desire to keep things simple.
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ronnier 1312 days ago
We is our industry.
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lomereiter 1312 days ago
Our industry is so disorganized that after half a century 'Software Engineer' is still not a recognized profession, and there is just as little interest in unionizing. I lack the audacity to make sweeping judgments about it.
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cercatrova 1312 days ago
NextJS server side rendering and React Server Components basically solve this problem.
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