use Perl

• AJAX isn't always a drain on the server (Score:1)

  by mpeters (5802) on 2006.05.04 20:33 (#47580) Homepage Journal

  Not that I'm an AJAX fanatic, but I think AJAX get's a bad rap for being a drain on server resources. If used right it can actually reduce bandwidth and lessen the work of the server.

  First off, page requests can be smaller since the whole thing doesn't have to be sent on each request. Secondly, common functionality that would otherwise take cycles to compute (navigation bars, etc) on each request don't need to be if that part of the page doesn't change. And if the application caches properly on the client side, it doesn't matter how many times users 'play' around by toggling something on/off, it only results in one request.

  Here's a real live example [macrumors.com] of some of this.

  Obviously if you send a request to the server for every letter typed by a user in a textarea you'll be having problems, but if you're doing that, you kind of deserve it :)

  Reply to This

  • Re:AJAX isn't always a drain on the server (Score:2)

    by pudge (1)

    Right now, Slashdot uses Ajax for comments in only one place: to load long comments. So we give you only a portion of the comment, and then you click "Read the Rest of this Comment" to get the rest. We will also do Ajax for, probably, moderation and replying, but that obviously won't increase server use in any way, since you now have to load whole pages to do the same thing.