Client v. Server Templating Shootout

to put it simply, browsers are really good (these days) at executing javascript, thus the biggest factor in this test seems to be the large(r) HTML payload.

though to make this a better test, I think you should serve both the JSON and HTML as static assets. after all, we're not interested in benchmarking ERB/to_json/ActiveRecord here, we care about the client side. server-side templating and JSON generation could both be quicker with optimizations and/or different backends.