Or a slow anything else, e.g., SQLite queries. This thread has focused on the network aspects, and they do stand out since there can be such a large gap between a network call vs a local SSD read. But we're still talking about a database, which could be huge (presumably it's the main, single DB for the whole app). And there is still all of the actual SQLite work that needs to happen to execute a query, plus opportunities for really bad performance b/c of bad queries, lack of indexes, all the usual suspects. Not to mention the load on the owning process itself. So, I'm agreeing that a loading state is needed.
I think this strongly depends on the application and use-case. I've worked at two businesses so far, and they target small and medium-sized companies in a tenant-style manner.
All data for one customer that is important enough to load easily fits within less than 5MB. That is of course not counting logs and such, but it's all "important" user-specific data. It's not -that- dissimilar from a small to medium-sized redux store in complexity. Lots of toggles, forms, raw text and some relations.
Of course this architecture doesn't scale to the enterprise level, or to other certain heavily data-driven applications (like imagine running the entirety of your sentry database in-browser?), but that's what architecture is -for-! Pick one that synergizes well with your use-case!
Assuming you're serving a frontend that makes network calls to a backend, you'll need to handle loading states in the frontend regardless of how the backend retrieves its data.
You're just saying, even if all you were doing was fetching a static JSON blob from the memory of the frontend server, you'd still want load states, right? (That makes sense, I'm just checking my understanding.)
The key here is to make a single API call to the backend which then runs 100+ SQL queries at once and combines the results into a single JSON response - that way you're only paying the network cost once.
I've implemented GraphQL on top of SQLite and found it to be an amazingly good match, because the biggest weakness of GraphQL is that it makes it easy to accidentally trigger 100s of queries in one request and with SQLite that really doesn't matter.
that doesn't eliminate need for loading states at all, and is already solved by things like react server components or remix (see waterfall removal graphic https://remix.run/)
i think this discussion is confusing the use of sqlite in local-first apps, where there's no loading states because the database is in the browser. you can use sqlite on your server, but you still need a "loading state".
even with postgres, if your data and server are colocated, the time between the 2 is already almost 0
now maybe the argument is your servers are deployed globally each with an sqlite db. that's not all that different from global postgres read replicas
If the data and the server are colocated on the same machine, the database network overhead is almost zero. But that's not necessarily true otherwise. For an HTTP request that incurs a single query, you can round it to zero, but you have to be careful not to write request handlers that incur lots of queries if you're trying to stay below the 100ms threshold.
