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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

Scaling a service has nothing to do with client size. Like, literally nothing.

It has something to do with the size of your app, though.

No, it doesn't. Size of application can correlate strongly with complexity and thus number of queries to the server, but there is nothing that dictates a 1.44MB+ HTML5 application ever even touches a server.

Aside from uhh.. DOWNLOADING the app. from. the. server. Unless you are imagining those files magic themselves onto your local machine somehow?

We're talking about static files, right? If you're trying to scale those should be nowhere near your application server. They get served from a CDN and the size is completely irrelevant to technical scaling issues.

Because CDN's are magic and have zero cost?

Money is easy. It's not part of the difficulty of scaling. 1000x the static traffic means 1000x the bandwidth heading to simple, independent, easy to load balance servers. Difficulty added per user: zero. Cost per user: the same or less.

There are many reasons to want small files, but scaling isn't one of them.

Indeed. Downloading the app. A one-time cost. No, I'm not imagining anything - are you?

A one time cost in a universe where your app never changes, CDNs cost nothing, and browsers have perfect caches, and everyone ubiquitously uses the localstorage and app-cache html5 apis.

Not everyone has a blazingly fast internet connection. I don't, even Hackernews loads slow for me at times.

If you want to scale, you'll have to reach me at some point and you won't reach me with a huge app that takes me 30 seconds to load.

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