[ameliaquining]

Monoliths vs. microservices has nothing to do with server-side rendering vs. GraphQL. Architecturally monolithic Web apps use GraphQL all the time.

I'm not sure why Medium does the weird blanking thing but my guess is that it's because it's deciding whether to let you read the article or instead put up a paywall. There are a lot of SPA sites out there, many of which aren't particularly economical with frontend resources, and they generally don't do that unless they're trying to enforce some kind of paywall or similar.

[jiggawatts]

> Architecturally monolithic Web apps use GraphQL all the time.

Sure, but a significant motivation for using GraphQL is to stitch together a bunch of microservices into a cohesive API for the front end.

My comment about Medium using microservices was just an informed guess, but a good one. They started migrating from a monolith to microservices back in 2018: https://medium.engineering/microservice-architecture-at-medi...

Is it a coincidence that that's around the time frame that I noticed the Medium web site becoming slower than it used to be?

[ameliaquining]

I do in fact think it's pretty unlikely that any performance degradation you observed was directly caused by microservices, as opposed to changes that directly affected the frontend.

[jiggawatts]

I politely disagree. Microservices are the large government bureaucracy of software architecture with similar efficiency outcomes for similar reasons.

[simfree]

Monoliths generally server side render. Server side rendering is fast, consistent and performant, the state of the client won't get into wonky territory since they are a button click away from getting current, known good state from the server.

[jdlshore]

That’s not a microservice vs monolith thing. That’s a client-side single-page app vs server-side rendering thing. Although, granted, I more often see microservice architectures with single-page apps than with server-side rendering.