Pure Rails

React + Rails

React SPA

Frontend Performance

🛑 Notoriously unperformant

• "Accidental" database calls from erb files are common
• Reload large amounts of content on each page transition
• erb is slow to render large nested structures

🛑 Suffers the same performance issues as Pure Rails

✅ Can be written to be performant much easier*******

• Hard to "accidentally" hit database
• Content only reloaded as needed
• Assets only loaded once

****** This isn't free... but it's easier than the other variants*

Backend Performance

🔶 ActiveRecord starts having issues at scale

🔶 ActiveRecord starts having issues at scale

🔶 ActiveRecord starts having issues at scale

• You may gain some ground by centralizing ActiveRecord calls to the controller
• You may also lose some ground with heavily generic REST APIs

Comparison