[pweissbrod]

In more cases than not I've noticed the choice of single page app itself is pure overhead.

SPA technology brings some key advantages but also a whole new realm of cost and complexity. It's my experience that SPA popularity has convinced many folks to use it when they really don't have a practical reason to justify it.

[com2kid]

Svelte is so insanely lightweight, I think it is a great counter argument to a lot of the SPA hate.

And honestly, most of the weight in modern websites comes from analytics and tracking tools. I've made insanely performant SPAs that work well on low budget hardware. My personal phone is 5 years old, if code I write doesn't perform flawlessly on it I'm not going to ship it to customers! Heck my personal dev laptop is a 4+ year old $999 Costco special.

Well made React sites can run just fine on devices like that, and Svelte runs even better.

Also SPAs scale better, I remember the days of website backends being slow, with page loads taking forever, massive amounts of HTML being generated server side using slow scripting languages.

Sending a JSON blob of some fields to the browser and having the browser update some nodes makes a lot more sense than the old school way of reloading the entire bloody page to change a couple fields.

[pweissbrod]

By choosing an SPA. You must choose a dedicated static site hosting which is separate from your web application. You may already have this but you may not. In most cases you must choose a framework for routing. Also a framework for state management. You also dedicate to duplicating validation and security trimming logic both on the client side and the server side. More often than not you will find yourself including hundreds of NPM packages as dependencies which you must continually update and maintain. Also the requirement for unit testing on the front end is common. Which brings in the need for things like jest and enzyme. This complexity inevitably trickles into your build and deploy processes. Perhaps in larger teams this is a burden you can absorb. In smaller teams however you start to see division of responsibilities. One person only knows front end but not back end and vice versa. Common knowledge of the application as a whole can become fragmented. Perhaps the day comes where you want to take a partial of a user interface posted in a peripheral application and place it inside your web page. Because you have a virtual DOM this is now a security risk. You must build a component which duplicates the user interface which already exists. If the user interface needs to be shared among many applications you must build a commons code base to host your components. You start shouldering the burden of maintaining component libraries instead of just HTML and CSS. Again this is all very general and hypothetical but it feels worth pointing out some of the common implications that simply choosing an SPA can have in the longer run.

Plus this is not an all or nothing sort of choice. For decades we have used Ajax to perform partial updates on a web page. Consider alternatives like HTMX as a comparison.

[AtlasBarfed]

I wish there was a "works for Pentium III" label that would help indicate that the app's usability hits necessary minimums on a 1Ghz Pentium III computer. IMO that would be a good optimization floor for avoiding the hidden monstrosity of electron apps and that type of stuff.

If your McCrud app can't be responsive on a baseline 1Ghz PIII with 1GB of RAM, then there needs to be some sort of shame pushback. Moore's law is effectively coming to a close, there will need to be more optimization in the future.

[ko27]

It's actually the opposite. MPAs are pure overhead. In theory SPAs are faster because they only require a minimum of 1 user blocking network request, while MPAs need at least 1 for each page. Everything else is up to the implementation. So if you are doing heavy performance optimizations, SPAs will always end up faster. However that's not the full picture, and in practice there is a lot of nuance, but SPAs definitely have a higher performance ceiling.

[pweissbrod]

Not for large DOMs. And for websites which Don't require support for low internet bandwidth this is optimizing for the wrong problem

[JLuterek]

This is very true. It's also why we have svelte-kit, remix, astrojs, and other frameworks that take a transitional app approach. They are server-rendered where it makes sense and client-rendered where necessary. Before developers had to choose between a server-rendered website and full on single-page application, now there are great options that blend the two depending on needs.

[meanyesterday]

Totally agree. Definitely a reason I avoided any SPA on findthca.com. I've never had a user complain that it needed one.