Once More Unto The Edge, Dear Friends

I recently wrote about one of the ironies of a Jamstack approach recently. Yes, rendering static content from the edge is fantastic, but only when the content is actually there. If you need to hit an API with client-side JavaScript to actually get the content, you aren’t benefiting all that much from “The Edge”.

Really not that big of a deal, just a thing to note if you’re shooting for absolute top speeds.

Jim made the point with graphics better than I did, so allow me to showcase them.

Fast, but no content:

Then content comes from a single-origin server later, slower:

Again, really not the world’s biggest deal, it’s just that:

1. If you’re shooting for the fastest possible speeds, get everything to the edge.
2. If your important content comes from a single-origin, just rendering it straight from there as HTML is probably faster than making client-side JavaScript go get it.