

Saving server costs with Javascript
 - mmaunder
http://markmaunder.com/2007/saving-server-costs-with-javascript/
...because most of the execution happens inside the browser and uses our visitors CPU and memory, I don't have to worry about my servers having to provide that CPU and memory...
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nostrademons
It's less of a benefit than you might think, because most websites are not
CPU-bound. The bottleneck tends to be disk seeks, particularly if you use a
database. You can't move I/O to your visitor's machines because you don't have
access to their disks.

Perhaps it'd be more useful for sites like Mailinator or news.YC that keep
everything in memory, but sites like that usually don't have performance
problems anyway. And bandwidth typically becomes a bottleneck if you try to
use a distributed memory cache over consumer Internet connections.

It'd be really useful for websites with heavy algorithmics, but how many
websites like that do you know? I work in the financial sector, and even there
this isn't feasible, because the data needed totals about 50 GB/day and
there's no way in hell you can transfer that over a dialup modem.

~~~
mmaunder
Sure, massive distributed processing is a stretch. But as a general guideline
for app architecture, this is IMHO a pretty good one. :)

