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Scaling React Server Side Rendering

arkwright.github.io

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Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#11

Post by t0astbread »

superkuh wrote: post #5

The easiest way to do this is to not use javascript for everything in the first place and to actually generate html instead of expecting people to run your code, then having to do it yourself in a convoluted workaround when they won't or can't.

Aren't you back to the scaling problem when you generate the HTML on your server? As in, you now have frontend code to run on your server, which is more or less the same as SSR.

Addendum: That is, if your loads are large enough of course. Small projects will not have scaling problems either way.

Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#12

Post by pjmlp »

simonw wrote: post #10
wayneftw wrote: post #6

There was no mention of why server-side rendering was needed at all. Based on my companies research Google and Bing do just fine without it. > when the server is under high load, skip the server-side render, and force the browser to perform the initial render. With this type of contingency plan, I don't see any reason to use server-side rendering at all. We build all of our sites and apps with React and don't do it a…

Try using client-side rendered website on a cheap Android phone on a 3G connection sometime - or even a cheap Android phone on LTE. That's how most of the world's population will experience your site. I'm baffled that so many sites have invested in multiple megabytes of JavaScript to render their pages. It's like our entire industry has forgotten how to build sites that can be used by anyone who's not on an LTE iPhon…

Thankfully most of our Web projects keep being SSR in Java and .NET stacks, with minimal JavaScript.

Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#14

Post by Touche »

simonw wrote: post #10
wayneftw wrote: post #6

There was no mention of why server-side rendering was needed at all. Based on my companies research Google and Bing do just fine without it. > when the server is under high load, skip the server-side render, and force the browser to perform the initial render. With this type of contingency plan, I don't see any reason to use server-side rendering at all. We build all of our sites and apps with React and don't do it a…

Try using client-side rendered website on a cheap Android phone on a 3G connection sometime - or even a cheap Android phone on LTE. That's how most of the world's population will experience your site. I'm baffled that so many sites have invested in multiple megabytes of JavaScript to render their pages. It's like our entire industry has forgotten how to build sites that can be used by anyone who's not on an LTE iPhon…

Our industry didn't forget, a generation of developers have come up who never developed web pages that way at all.

Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#15

Post by Vesuvium »

wayneftw wrote: post #6

There was no mention of why server-side rendering was needed at all. Based on my companies research Google and Bing do just fine without it. > when the server is under high load, skip the server-side render, and force the browser to perform the initial render. With this type of contingency plan, I don't see any reason to use server-side rendering at all. We build all of our sites and apps with React and don't do it a…

I find it ironic and explicatory of the incompentency level we have reached in IT today.

Technologies used outside of their context and "developers" having to deal with complex problems they should not even have in the first place.

Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#16

Post by encoderer »

wayneftw wrote: post #6

There was no mention of why server-side rendering was needed at all. Based on my companies research Google and Bing do just fine without it. > when the server is under high load, skip the server-side render, and force the browser to perform the initial render. With this type of contingency plan, I don't see any reason to use server-side rendering at all. We build all of our sites and apps with React and don't do it a…

If you have a small website google will render your JavaScript for every crawled page. For large websites only a sample of pages are fully rendered. Your seo will suffer.

Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#17

Post by adossi »

pjmlp wrote: post #12
simonw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using client-side rendered website on a cheap Android phone on a 3G connection sometime - or even a cheap Android phone on LTE. That's how most of the world's population will experience your site. I'm baffled that so many sites have invested in multiple megabytes of JavaScript to render their pages. It's like our entire industry has forgotten how to build sites that can be used by anyone who's not on an LTE iPhon…

Thankfully most of our Web projects keep being SSR in Java and .NET stacks, with minimal JavaScript.

One of the main reasons I never bothered to learn React was that using Razor syntax in .cshtml on my ASP .NET projects has all the convenience of react with no client-side overhead. However I understand there is some benefit to delegating some of the work to clients considering the power of modern devices.

Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#18

Post by sgslo »

encoderer wrote: post #16
wayneftw wrote: post #6

There was no mention of why server-side rendering was needed at all. Based on my companies research Google and Bing do just fine without it. > when the server is under high load, skip the server-side render, and force the browser to perform the initial render. With this type of contingency plan, I don't see any reason to use server-side rendering at all. We build all of our sites and apps with React and don't do it a…

If you have a small website google will render your JavaScript for every crawled page. For large websites only a sample of pages are fully rendered. Your seo will suffer.

SEO alone is a poor reason to use server side rendering. Services like https://prerender.io/ completely solve SEO for SPA's and can be as cheap as $0 per month. Compare that to dozens/hundreds of hours of engineering time spent setting up an SSR implementation; it is a no-brainer.

Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#19

Post by Scarbutt »

superkuh wrote: post #5

The easiest way to do this is to not use javascript for everything in the first place and to actually generate html instead of expecting people to run your code, then having to do it yourself in a convoluted workaround when they won't or can't.

Creating solutions for auto-created problems.

Re: Scaling React Server Side Rendering

#20

Post by Vesuvium »

t0astbread wrote: post #11
superkuh wrote: post #5

The easiest way to do this is to not use javascript for everything in the first place and to actually generate html instead of expecting people to run your code, then having to do it yourself in a convoluted workaround when they won't or can't.

Aren't you back to the scaling problem when you generate the HTML on your server? As in, you now have frontend code to run on your server, which is more or less the same as SSR. Addendum: That is, if your loads are large enough of course. Small projects will not have scaling problems either way.

That's exactly the point he's making. If you use a frontend js framework and you have to do SSR, then there's no longer any reason to use a JS frontend framework, because the reason they were made was to offload to clients the rendering, at the price of more complexity.

Back then, the cloud was not a thing yet, there was no Docker, no Kubernetes, no nice APIs to start instances, so it made sense to offload some computation to clients. Today, no longer.

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