Json Or Html: Which Output Can Perform Better?

I am thinking of improving website performance by moving rendering to the client side. The current stack is: (router, sphinx, db) + HTML. I am thinking of changing this to: (router

Solution 1:

1, 2) Probably yes, but there could be uncounted for factors, which may make the performance increase to be less than you expect. Like, if bottleneck is IO, and as HTML creation probably is CPU-limited, then reducing CPU load will only let CPUs idle more. Only way to find out really is to have reliable benchmarks while running parallel request handling, and get hard numbers.

Further, spending the hours to develop client-side rendering might be more expensive, than just paying for more server capacity... Moore's law is still holding, doing that kind of optimization for such a small improvement is probably not worth the development cost... Probably better to concentrate those dev resources on something which would increase revenue, instead of trying to make small savings.

3) JSON generation probably uses a native library, while HTML generation happens in Ruby script code. And native code is typically 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than interpreted (and not JIT-compiled) code at low level operations. The higher level operation it is, the narrower the gap, so if "generate JSON" is the high level operation, then it's equally fast if you call it from Ruby or from compiled language code.

4) Well, not sure I understand the question, but see answer 1,2...

Solution 2:

see http://openmymind.net/2012/5/30/Client-Side-vs-Server-Side-Rendering/ maybe that will help you

best way to find out for you particular case is to implement it and test. you can use new relic and google analytics (maybe others as well) to see client performance and rendering times and experience