alt Hacker NewsI've been curious for a while now. One thing that gives me pause though is how Phoenix LiveView apps perform when you're dealing with high latency. I'm aware that many apps will be serving primarily the US market and so might not recognise this as much of an issue. I'm also aware that I could deploy 'at the edge' with something like fly.io. Still, when I run a ping test to 100 different locations around the world from NZ, the majority of results are 300ms+. That seems like it would have a pretty noticeable impact on a user's experience.
TLDR; Are most Phoenix deployments focused on a local market or deployed 'at the edge' or are people ignoring the potentially janky experience for far-flung users?
Replies
Yes, unfortunately that is the big weakness of LiveView. It also suffers from what I call the elevator problem, where LiveView apps are unusable with unstable connections and flat out stop working in an elevator or areas with spotty connections.
However, Elixir and Phoenix is more than just LiveView! There’s also an Inertia plugin for Phoenix, and Ecto as an “ORM” is fantastic.
while its true that phoenix liveview's default is to have all state be on the server, there are hooks to run javascript behavior on the frontend for things like optimistic updates and transitions. This gives plenty of ways to make the frontend feel responsive even when the roundtrip is 300+.