Whole blog post is basically: Make a mutation in the clientside, assume it worked, and save in the background.
How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
11–20 of 250 posts
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#12Thanks for the read. It is a bit more complicated than you think. I completely rebuilt this sync engine + orm with relations, lazy loading etc, using Vue + Pinia in https://playcode.io . Google Linear’s videos, they explained in detail their architecture. Yes, I spent a few months. But it worth it. Every new field, model I need to add, it is so straightforward. I do love frameworks and foundations. They make live eas…
Feel free to ask questions.
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#13These kinds of local-first syncing web apps are really interesting and can be really useful, but I think the premise is somewhat wrong.
"A few milliseconds is all it takes to update an issue in Linear. A traditional CRUD app doing the same thing takes about 300ms."
"Any data sent between the client and server costs hundreds of milliseconds."
There’s no solving the problem of a large RTT between an HTTP client and server when it’s due to the speed of light.
But what you can do is locate the backend near users and make sure it’s fast.
For example, it’s very possible to run a web app backend within ~10ms RTT of most users and have the backend render responses within ~10ms too.
In other words, you can absolutely create a traditional CRUD app where doing the same thing takes more like 30ms, not 300ms.
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#14Any good resources or wrappers for indexedDB people would recommend? The API seems kinda unapproachable compared to other data stores.
https://github.com/tinyplex/tinybase seems kinda good maybe?
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#15Thanks for the read. It is a bit more complicated than you think. I completely rebuilt this sync engine + orm with relations, lazy loading etc, using Vue + Pinia in https://playcode.io . Google Linear’s videos, they explained in detail their architecture. Yes, I spent a few months. But it worth it. Every new field, model I need to add, it is so straightforward. I do love frameworks and foundations. They make live eas…
what google linear video?
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#16Thanks for the read. It is a bit more complicated than you think. I completely rebuilt this sync engine + orm with relations, lazy loading etc, using Vue + Pinia in https://playcode.io . Google Linear’s videos, they explained in detail their architecture. Yes, I spent a few months. But it worth it. Every new field, model I need to add, it is so straightforward. I do love frameworks and foundations. They make live eas…
what google linear video?
I think google is an imperative verb here. You're supposed to google (as in search for) Linears Videos.
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#17I’ve actually found Linear to be quite slow? There was a week where it would also spin at 100% CPU if I left a tab with it open for a while :(
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#18> A traditional CRUD app doing the same thing takes about 300ms. 300ms seems like a lot. Even if this includes the whole http request+response it still seems unbelievably long.
It depends on where your clients are, and where your servers are. You may have a lot of customers in a country and not want to host servers in that country (tax, regulatory, maintenance cost, etc.)
RTT from Hyderabad to the East Coast USA is ~300ms.
Then you have execution and database retrieval.
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#19I worry that optimistic updates is going to become trendy and applied to more software, but without any plan for the "sad path" - failed to sync, sync conflict, etc. Get ready for a whole new era of race conditions and frustration!
Re: How's Linear so fast? A technical breakdown
#20Whole blog post is basically: Make a mutation in the clientside, assume it worked, and save in the background.
I agree. To each their own, but the UI updating automatically doesn't really add much value to me. I would prefer that the view I am seeing is a snapshot in time of what the ground truth server was, not some mixed state that forces me to consider the possibility that seeing my request go through on the screen doesn't actually mean it went through and has been sent to the server.