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Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

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Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#211

Post by cultofmetatron »

robertoandred wrote: post #122
ninkendo wrote: post #115

One of the fastest, lowest latency websites I use is HN, and it’s entirely server rendered. It’s also a massively popular website with probably thousands of hits per minute. Anyone who tells you server side rendering is too slow, probably has no idea what they’re talking about.

Server-side rendering can absolutely be slow, and client-side can absolutely be fast. It's all dependent on the quality of the developer.

and your ops configuration. you'll see huge differences based on how you configure your database environment as your db gets larger.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#212

Post by la_fayette »

ninkendo wrote: post #115

One of the fastest, lowest latency websites I use is HN, and it’s entirely server rendered. It’s also a massively popular website with probably thousands of hits per minute. Anyone who tells you server side rendering is too slow, probably has no idea what they’re talking about.

To be clear, there is a difference between SSR and SSG. SSG is something like PHP, which generates the full page HTML in the backend. I think HN is SSG? Many news websites or wordpress blogs also fall in this category...

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#213

Post by arielcostas »

ninepoints wrote: post #197
ninkendo wrote: post #115

One of the fastest, lowest latency websites I use is HN, and it’s entirely server rendered. It’s also a massively popular website with probably thousands of hits per minute. Anyone who tells you server side rendering is too slow, probably has no idea what they’re talking about.

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion here, but I hate this website's UX. Replying to a comment loads a new page, losing the entire context of the thread. There is no UI to indicate if there's a reply to an earlier comment made. The typograph is ugly as sin, and hard to read (too small on desktop, looks bad on mobile, poor contrast). With new pages needed for basic reply/editing capabilities, the site doesn't even ac…

Don't know who built this site or how old it is, but the UX is definitely sub-par compared to many other server-rendered sites. Submitting a form and losing the scroll position doesn't happen in every site, even if the page gets reloaded. And the font thing is more of a CSS problem than a SSR/client-rendering problem.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#214

Post by Pxtl »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #93
Pxtl wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean it's not really as hominem is it? I'm not arguing the point at all. I just mean that invoking a controversial like Thiel for something as reasonable as discussing the merits of server side rendering is a very odd choice.

Agreed, I came into this article emotionally prepared to disagree after just reading the title.

At the risk of reductio ad absurdum:

"Title: A Stalin-inspired Look at Webfarm Management

Body: Apocryphally, Stalin once said that quantity has a quality all its own. As such, our hosting system involves an absolutely bonkers number of servers."

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#215

Post by quaintdev »

arielcostas wrote: post #213
ninepoints wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion here, but I hate this website's UX. Replying to a comment loads a new page, losing the entire context of the thread. There is no UI to indicate if there's a reply to an earlier comment made. The typograph is ugly as sin, and hard to read (too small on desktop, looks bad on mobile, poor contrast). With new pages needed for basic reply/editing capabilities, the site doesn't even ac…

Don't know who built this site or how old it is, but the UX is definitely sub-par compared to many other server-rendered sites. Submitting a form and losing the scroll position doesn't happen in every site, even if the page gets reloaded. And the font thing is more of a CSS problem than a SSR/client-rendering problem.

Maybe it's time to implement this site Ux with htmx

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#216

Post by traverseda »

la_fayette wrote: post #212
ninkendo wrote: post #115

One of the fastest, lowest latency websites I use is HN, and it’s entirely server rendered. It’s also a massively popular website with probably thousands of hits per minute. Anyone who tells you server side rendering is too slow, probably has no idea what they’re talking about.

To be clear, there is a difference between SSR and SSG. SSG is something like PHP, which generates the full page HTML in the backend. I think HN is SSG? Many news websites or wordpress blogs also fall in this category...

I've never heard the term SSG before. Apparently stands for "static site generating" and is a `next.js` thing.

No, hacker news is not a static site. It just makes use of caching HTML on unchanged pages, and as I understand it that cache is often bypassed for logged in users. This is why sometimes when hackernews is overloaded you can still view the site in private browsing, since you're not logged in it hits the cache instead of generating a page for you.

A cache is not a static site, although maybe next.js is redefining the term, I don't know. Get off my lawn.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#217

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

bofadeez wrote: post #207
halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this is your opinion, a majority of the frontend development experience has borne these solutions out of real problems, not in spite of them. Every take like this reeks of never having built large and interactive frontend projects that involve more than 1 developer. Sure you can get by on htmx/html/css/tailwind/whatever simplistic thing you can conjure up but those things don't SCALE, which is what these framew…

The argument that 'simplistic' technologies don't scale is dismissive of the robust, enterprise-level applications that have been successfully built without heavy frontend frameworks. It's not the tool that scales; it's the architecture and the development practices.

> enterprise-level applications that have been successfully built

Who? When? Where? I refuse to believe this assertion. Are we talking past or present? The whole reason why these frontend focused frameworks exist is because either the existing solutions (pure html, even with preprocessors like handlebars, pure vanilla JS, lower level libs like jQuery) did not scale to meet demand or existing frameworks (JSP, PHP, etc) became a mess at scale.

Everyone loves to throw out these imaginary success stories of corps rolling just with html/css but I've never seen it actually proven true with evidence.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#218

Post by michaelmior »

la_fayette wrote: post #212
ninkendo wrote: post #115

One of the fastest, lowest latency websites I use is HN, and it’s entirely server rendered. It’s also a massively popular website with probably thousands of hits per minute. Anyone who tells you server side rendering is too slow, probably has no idea what they’re talking about.

To be clear, there is a difference between SSR and SSG. SSG is something like PHP, which generates the full page HTML in the backend. I think HN is SSG? Many news websites or wordpress blogs also fall in this category...

I assume by SSG you mean static site generation? If so, that's something different entirely. At least in the ways I have commonly seen it used, SSG refers to generation of HTML offline so that all the content hosted is static. For example, in a blog you would generate one HTML page for each blog post. If you were running a blog using some PHP service (such as WordPress), then even those static HTML is what's sent to the browser, the pages themselves are generated on the fly.

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#219

Post by michaelmior »

traverseda wrote: post #216
la_fayette wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, there is a difference between SSR and SSG. SSG is something like PHP, which generates the full page HTML in the backend. I think HN is SSG? Many news websites or wordpress blogs also fall in this category...

I've never heard the term SSG before. Apparently stands for "static site generating" and is a `next.js` thing. No, hacker news is not a static site. It just makes use of caching HTML on unchanged pages, and as I understand it that cache is often bypassed for logged in users. This is why sometimes when hackernews is overloaded you can still view the site in private browsing, since you're not logged in it hits the cach…

SSG long predates Next.js. It was by no means the first, but I wrote something that I think could be called a SSG (not the term I used at the time) back in 2010 while the first release of Next.js wasn't until 2016.

[0] https://michael.mior.ca/blog/designing-an-offline-cms/

Re: Server-side rendering is a better choice for many applications (2020)

#220

Post by [deleted] »

la_fayette wrote: post #212
ninkendo wrote: post #115

One of the fastest, lowest latency websites I use is HN, and it’s entirely server rendered. It’s also a massively popular website with probably thousands of hits per minute. Anyone who tells you server side rendering is too slow, probably has no idea what they’re talking about.

To be clear, there is a difference between SSR and SSG. SSG is something like PHP, which generates the full page HTML in the backend. I think HN is SSG? Many news websites or wordpress blogs also fall in this category...

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