CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpjavascriptjson
Filip Górny
Filip Górny

Reputation: 1769

Guidance on the number of http calls; is too much AJAX a problem?

I develop a website based on the way that every front end thing is written in JavaScript. Communication with server is made trough JSON. So I am hesitating about it: - is the fact I'm asking for every single data with http request query OK, or is it completely unacceptable? (after all many web developers change multiple image request to css sprites).

Can you give me a hint please?

Thanks

Upvotes: 2

Views: 118

Answers (3)

Brock Adams
Brock Adams

Reputation: 93533

My personal philosophy is:

  1. The initial page load should be AJAX-free.

  2. The page should operate without JavaScript well enough for the user to do all basic tasks.

  3. With JavaScript, use AJAX in response to user actions and to replace full page reloads with targeted AJAX calls. After that, use as many AJAX calls as seem reasonable.

Upvotes: 1

sarnold
sarnold

Reputation: 104080

It really depends upon the overall server load and bandwidth use.

If your site is very low traffic and is under no CPU or bandwidth burden, write your application in whatever manner is (a) most maintainable (b) lowest chance to introduce bugs.

Of course, if the latency involved in making thirty HTTP requests for data is too awful, your users will hate you :) even if you server is very lightly loaded. Thirty times even 30 milliseconds equals an unhappy experience. So it depends very much on how much data each client will need to render each page or action.

If your application starts to suffer from too many HTTP connections, then you should look at bundling together the data that is always used together -- it wouldn't make sense to send your entire database to every client on every connection :) -- so try to hit the 'lowest hanging fruit' first, and combine the data together that is always used together, to reduce extra connections.

Upvotes: 3

ThiefMaster
ThiefMaster

Reputation: 318568

If you can request multiple related things at once, do it. But there's no real reason against sending multiple HTTP requests - that's how AJAX apps usually work. ;)

The reason for using sprites instead of single small images is to reduce loading times since only one file has to be loaded instead of tons of small files at once - or at a certain time when it'd be desirable to have the image already available to be displayed.

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions