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Comment by _greim_ | Hacker News Reader

Correct, except that initial app load time for un-cookied users with cold browser caches is a critical metric, since it largely determines whether they'll keep using your app. Fortunately, those are the scenarios where server-side caching can have a decent benefit, since you're essentially rendering the same view to all such users.

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initial app load time for un-cookied users with cold browser caches is a critical metric, since it largely determines whether they'll keep using your app

This is "bounce before document.ready()?" How does it compare to "bounce before ad networks/API calls finish" and "bounce before end of autoplay video?"

I'm thinking that with all the other API goo in many mainstream/mass-media sites, "initial app load time" is something users are probably pretty tolerant of, unless "load time" includes stuff beyond the page becoming interactive.

> This is "bounce before document.ready()?"

Since we're talking about SSR which happens before anything else, latency is going to push out all load-time metrics equally.

> I'm thinking that with all the other API goo in many mainstream/mass-media sites, "initial app load time" is something users are probably pretty tolerant of

It's all relative. Presumably you're competing on some level with those mainstream/mass-media sites, so users will punish/reward you if your site takes more/less time to load than average.

If all first time users see the same thing, why not serve a precompiled static html that then gets taken over by React.

Isn’t that the whole point?

So very much this. Particularly if you dont have enough context to be personalized, pre-compiled popular segments are a reasonable approach.

> If all first time users see the same thing

That's a big, important, if.

It's good odds, though. Obviously depending on the app, these would be non-logged-in users who don't get personalized content.

There can be (though you’d be surprised- there’s rarely such a thing as a non-identifiable user nowadays). Just pointing out it’s a very big conditional.

For example: I work at Bleacher Report and our non-logged-in users get data customized for them. That can be as simple as GeoIP data or can be us knowing (and inferring) what articles or content they’ve seen.

The permutations are quite large.

Now some blog, or a very simple app won’t do something like that (hell, they might not have the depth of content to be able to) but it’s reasonbly common to have that requirement on large sites outside of v.limited pages (like login/signup etc)

And if only a few things need to be customized, skeleton states can help bridge the gap.

https://css-tricks.com/building-skeleton-screens-css-custom-...

Yes, that's exactly what React SSR + caching accomplishes!

Modern JS frameworks try to solve this problem by inlining critical CSS and JS into the head for anything above the fold, and loading the rest dynamically.

Which frameworks do this?

Check out https://github.com/zeit/next.js/ https://github.com/addyosmani/critical

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