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Comment by spookthesunset | Hacker News Reader

Gigabytes of memory yes but there is load time and render time too. And rendering a 120mb payload of items and their thumbnails before I can even view the top of the page seems… not the best user experience.

I don’t think there is an easy answer here. All options have some trade offs.

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Typically when I serialize data for #index endpoints I return much slimmer payloads than I do in #show endpoints. I recognize that 120mb was an extreme, but you should be able to serialize lists of 500+ items into well under 1mb, with enough data to render your list view thumbnails/links.

I always thought the infinite scroll pattern was designed for analytics purposes. So that you can track user engagement. Not because technology constraints necessitated it or that it was a good user experience.

Just have JS track where the user is?

Deferring rendering of the images seems like an easy enough thing to do if your alternative is infinite scrolling. Pre-load the text and layout but leave the images and video until they're close to the viewport.

That is not how browsers work. The browser will render the viewport immediately, long before the page has loaded. It will also load the visible thumbnails first, unless made impossible by complicated markup of course. Otherwise surfing the web on dialup in 1996 would have been intolerable.

Sooner or later you have to unload content or the browser crashes. There's an upper limit to how many DOM elements browsers can handle, even with modern optimizations.

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