A bit of a tangent, but Notion is performing well for a post on the HN front page, even with equations.
It is also mentioned on today's changelog: https://www.notion.so/What-s-New-157765353f2c4705bd45474e5ba...
So that could mean two things:
- SQLite is being used in-memory, but things are still being flushed to IndexedDB for persistence? shouldn't help with faster page navigation here
- SQLite is not being used, so it can't explain the performance increase
I think the answer is more in the second link (changelog):
> - *Your workspace is now more reliable after Apr 16, 2021's scheduled maintenance — we upgraded from a single database instance to a sharded deployment, which means Notion is now capable of serving 3x as much traffic as before*
[1]: https://www.notion.so/Math-equations-b4e9e4e03677413481a4910...
[2]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:afS5a6...
On an other hand, Notion doesn't seem built to serve read-only webpages like a static blog or Medium.com: the expectation is that you'll use the editor, so assumption is javascript is enabled and the editor itself can be used to render a read-only view from JSON or however they're keeping document state.
Opening dev tools on the website, it looks like they're just using Webpack (like React CRA?); not sure if they're changing the javascript bundle per page like with Next.js. It would make sense to not have server-side rendering if you're building both browser and desktop apps, since that would mean avoiding a separate framework only for the browser.
Another clue is that people who try to use Notion as a CMS for their blogs had to build out a React library to emulate the feel of Notion itself: https://github.com/splitbee/react-notion https://github.com/NotionX/react-notion-x.