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by danappelxx 804 days ago
I think you always need loading states to account for slow network, or am I missing something?
3 comments

>to account for slow network

Or a slow anything else, e.g., SQLite queries. This thread has focused on the network aspects, and they do stand out since there can be such a large gap between a network call vs a local SSD read. But we're still talking about a database, which could be huge (presumably it's the main, single DB for the whole app). And there is still all of the actual SQLite work that needs to happen to execute a query, plus opportunities for really bad performance b/c of bad queries, lack of indexes, all the usual suspects. Not to mention the load on the owning process itself. So, I'm agreeing that a loading state is needed.

I think this strongly depends on the application and use-case. I've worked at two businesses so far, and they target small and medium-sized companies in a tenant-style manner.

All data for one customer that is important enough to load easily fits within less than 5MB. That is of course not counting logs and such, but it's all "important" user-specific data. It's not -that- dissimilar from a small to medium-sized redux store in complexity. Lots of toggles, forms, raw text and some relations.

Of course this architecture doesn't scale to the enterprise level, or to other certain heavily data-driven applications (like imagine running the entirety of your sentry database in-browser?), but that's what architecture is -for-! Pick one that synergizes well with your use-case!

The SQLite database is located on the application server, so there is no network between the DB and the app.
Assuming you're serving a frontend that makes network calls to a backend, you'll need to handle loading states in the frontend regardless of how the backend retrieves its data.
The idea is that you're not doing that.
Unless your database is in the browser, you are always going to be at mercy of network latencies talking to the backend.
You're just saying, even if all you were doing was fetching a static JSON blob from the memory of the frontend server, you'd still want load states, right? (That makes sense, I'm just checking my understanding.)
Yup, exactly. Phones change wifi networks, routers drop packets, load balancers get overloaded. Hard to fully eliminate tail latencies.
You can with sqlite in webassembly
In theory, but there are still a lot of sharp edges. e.g. I wanted to use sqlite in-browser with an ORM, but few ORMs support such a setup.
And your users are sitting in front the application server?
I “use the platform” so clicking a new tab shows the browser loading state. If you’re on a slow network, that’s the way I go about it.