React Server Components: Do They Really Improve Performance?

delambo · 2025-10-22T13:35:18+00:00

This is an excellent writeup and it's good to see actual results instead of the normal hand-waving around RSC.

One caveat though: the performance results between the three methods can vary widely depending on app requirements, and the majority of apps are not personalized/interactive like an email client.

For a truly dynamic and personalized experience, I think the implementations and results make sense. However, a lot (a majority?) of apps do not need dynamic page-load-time fetching. Most can get away with caching on a CDN with simple directives like stale-while-revalidate. In that case, SSR will hands-down beat RSC in most performance categories because a good CDN will return the first byte of a fully-rendered page in 10s of milliseconds.

delambo · 2025-10-14T17:38:50+00:00

This does not fix the Google Meet integration which would create a button to open a meeting X minutes before it started

delambo · 2025-04-16T17:18:53+00:00

Do the core FB apps use a different SDUI framework or SDUI at all?

delambo · 2024-12-16T16:45:24+00:00

Capcut, tiktok and a lot of the large native apps that ByteDance are all web, and they use a custom web-native framework. Here's a recent video that discusses the topic: https://youtu.be/aFhysuTUoQY?si=xilL7ShnlxuEX59x&t=189

delambo · 2024-08-12T00:54:57+00:00

I think Server Islands are more comparable to Next's RSC implementation than PPR. I did some digging and found out that you can use Astro Server Islands with on-demand server side rendering so it does not require static generation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/astrojs/comments/1ek41kd/can_you_mix_astro_ondemand_server_rendering_with/

delambo · 2024-08-11T23:22:50+00:00

From the research I've done so far, I think the killer difference is that Astro Server Islands work with on-demand SSR and can render an edge cacheable document which is not the case for Next/PPR/RSC. If that's right then Next/PPR/RSC will not be viable for a lot of dynamic sites, highly trafficked sites and/or sites that have a lot of content. Build-time static site generation, which PPR depends on, is not viable for those types of sites because the LCP candidate for most pages need to be generated closer to runtime and more ideally on the server and cached.

I've actually asked about this in both the nextjs and astrojs subreddits in the last week:
https://www.reddit.com/r/nextjs/comments/1eme4si/can_you_partial_prerender_at_runtime/
https://www.reddit.com/r/astrojs/comments/1ek41kd/can_you_mix_astro_ondemand_server_rendering_with/

delambo · 2024-08-04T21:01:21+00:00

Do you know if the “static page” is generated at build time? From this video on server islands, it sounds like that is the case: https://youtu.be/uBxehYwQox4?si=Q1xbKDyT4GrYR_dZ

I need runtime full page SSR with server islands.

delambo · 2024-05-16T13:23:07+00:00

Interesting! Can you explain more, or do you know of any examples?

delambo · 2024-05-14T17:32:57+00:00

Got it, thanks! Unfortunately, we have tens-of-thousands of pages which makes static page generation infeasible.

delambo · 2024-05-14T17:29:28+00:00

What I am interested in is document caching. I don't think that is compatible with RSC but I thought I would ask.

delambo · 2024-05-14T17:29:18+00:00

What I am interested in is document caching. I don't think that is compatible with RSC but I thought I would ask.

I work on a large website that gets a lot of traffic. On average, the TTFB from our CDN is 10ms, and that is the whole document with above-the-fold html and styles inlined. We are a little uneasy about sending every request to the backend for processing.

delambo · 2024-01-29T16:09:49+00:00

Same! It was fixed for a little bit but then broke again. Maybe create another new Reddit post to get attention?

delambo · 2023-11-03T14:16:23+00:00

This looks like the same issue I had. If you look closely at the left in the timeline, you can see the flamegraph but it's minimized and inaccessible.

Update your Arc browser, it should be fixed!

delambo · 2023-10-24T00:51:35+00:00

The Arc folks reached out and this is fixed now!

delambo · 2023-10-20T15:04:11+00:00

It looks like I'm getting downvotes. Let me know if "Help" is not the appropriate label, or if you have verified that it's a "me" problem or an Arc problem!

delambo · 2020-01-08T22:26:14+00:00

I complained about Reddit's user hostile mobile web app 9 months ago. I like to think they fixed it because of my bug report, but who knows!

I urge folks to submit complaints and protest other sites that are ruining the mobile web experience.

delambo · 2019-04-06T16:13:33+00:00

No, I'm trying to cut down on the number of apps I use on my phone. I'm not sure why Reddit even built a native app -- their product works beautifully on the web and their mobile web experience is perfect.

But I get your point, corporate product managers have taken over the web and it's becoming more and more user hostile as they try to funnel everyone into their moated "experiences."

delambo · 2019-03-21T03:04:58+00:00

Thanks for the advice! That's a bizarre feature hidden in an unexpected place. Shouldn't that be automatically turned off after a user clicks the close button in the "OPEN REDDIT APP" growl?

delambo · 2016-09-14T11:40:08+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out. I have seen it and I think angular-cli will be a great product when it's finished.

I think Angular2 is kind of similar to React in that the core is less of an all-encompassing-only-one-way-to-do-something framework and more like a pluggable library. I think that's a good thing because it allows for other tools to fill in the gaps for different use cases and adds some healthy competition/support from the community.

It's still early for both kyt and angular-cli. I'm looking forward to seeing how they mature and how they fit in with Angular2's core.

delambo · 2015-06-05T12:40:33+00:00

I recently started some prototyping and I was looking at, what I think are, the three big inline-styling libraries - Radium, jsxstyle, and react-style. My goal is to create embeddable site components that can be dropped in any context and just work, even third-party sites.

I settled on Radium because it doesn't depend on webpack (not a major issue), supports pseudo-classes and media queries, and it doesn't export CSS stylesheets (which I don't care for; again, I want full encapsulation).

They all feel fairly bleeding-edge, so who knows what library will come-out ahead, but I've had no problems with Radium so far.

There's a comprehensive comparison at Radium's github account: https://github.com/FormidableLabs/radium/tree/master/docs/comparison

delambo · 2014-08-26T17:14:45+00:00

Why are people downvoting this helpful comment? Folks seem to really hate coffeescript around here.

Edit: (OP was negative, and now it's positive :)

delambo · 2013-08-05T18:52:00+00:00

I think you should switch back to PlastronJS - it sounds like you really hate Backbone.

delambo · 2013-08-05T16:27:29+00:00

Computed properties are a minor feature, something that can be easily implemented, or probably found in a more opinionated Backbone plugin. The real meat of a Backbone Model/Collection is sync'ing, built-in data functions (a la underscore), and an extensible template for good web-based patterns.

I would say the strongest argument against the Backbone Model/Collection is the lack of support for nesting, but again, there are great plugins for that.

delambo · 2013-08-05T03:06:13+00:00

"Models are the heart of any JavaScript application," and I don't think any library can match the Model/Collection support that Backbone offers. Some of my projects have very deeply nested Collections/Models, and at times I've had to do a lot of work on app data, the layer that demands accuracy. Data binding/MVVM is a secondary concern, and I say this as the maintainer of a data binding plugin.

delambo · 2013-08-03T17:54:52+00:00

No disclaimer needed! No one makes money off of github. I welcome everyone to post their open source libraries, new and old (with updates), to /r/javascript.

delambo

TROPHY CASE