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by mcrider 4607 days ago
I ran a meteor app as an entry system for a local design awards show last month. Everything went swimmingly well and people loved the fast app-like interface. The only place I had trouble was on the admin side where large amounts of items were sometimes not loading properly (usually a page refresh would clear the problem though). My takeaway was 1) This is beta software people, of course its not going to be perfect and 2) Deciding what should be sent to the client takes some thought and I could have almost certainly made things more efficient. With time, I think both of those issues will be resolved what with the highly active meteor community and MDG making great progress on the framework, and with me thinking more 'meteor-like' and building my apps more efficiently.
1 comments

did you make sure that you don't have the insecure package installed, that pushes the entire database to each client, and instead are subscribing to the data? this is reminiscent of how one one of proof of concept apps was acting a few months back and that was the cause.
Sure, thats Meteor 101 ;) Still, as a developer you need to decide what collections you want to publish (and which parts of each collection) so as to make the application run blazing-fast but also make sure you're only publishing stuff when its needed. This, IMO takes some finessing to get right.
This was definitely my biggest scaling painpoint. I used meteor for an app that throws a lot of data points at the client (interactive realtime timeseries data) and it required trying a few different approaches until I was happy with the amount of data I was sending over the wire on first load vs making the client's first experience as interesting as possible.

My current gripe is with the spiderable package and phantomjs for seo bots, but that is a different beast...

I've gotten spiderable to work okay but yeah it does kindof suck. According to the Meteor roadmap, MDG is looking for a better solution but its slated for a 1.1 release (i.e. server-side rendering).
ah ok :) interesting, could you share some of the code in question, or is this a closed source app? I'd be happy to take a quick look
The project was based off of the CMS I've been building in my spare time: https://github.com/mcrider/azimuth. There are probably a lot of things I could do to optimize collections with lots of data but i've been focusing more on functionality for now.