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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

Millions of pages? What was the site?

It’s not so unusual. My employer has a product line of ~40k products, in ~45 markets, with ~2 languages per market, which gets you to 3.6m product pages immediately, and that’s leaving aside any other pages.

That's fair, but I bet you're not using a static site generator to produce your PDPs. (Or, if so, I'd love to read an engineering blog post about it! Static PDPs would be a solid optimization in a lot of ways, and while I'm no longer in a role where that could be directly useful, it'd still be interesting to find out what challenges a team overcame and how in the course of getting there.)

Most content on our PDPs are statically pre-rendered, yes. Some stuff we obviously can’t of course (e.g. some of the recommendations that are based on your personal behaviour), and those tend to be mini-SPAs. We save from having to re-render everything if, say, a menu item changes, by compositing page fragments at a CDN level and caching the result for a shorter amount of time.

This setup is not particularly unusual for a microfrontends environment I don’t believe.

We did much the same, as I recall. (I didn't spend very much time close to the frontend in that role, so I may misremember, but that description has a familiar ring.)

It's probably about as far as the concept can reasonably be taken; in theory I could see something more like "true" SSR with some probably complex hydration, but the engineering time would likely make it uneconomic to pursue what would likely be marginal benefit.

It was basically a clone of https://www.gutenberg.org/.

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