> overfetching is never such a big problem

Wait, what? Overfetching is easily one of the top #3 reasons for the enshittification on the modern web! It's one of the primary causes of incredible slowdowns we've all experienced.

Just go to any slow web app, press F12 and look at the megabytes transferred on the network tab. Copy-paste all text on the screen and save it to a file. Count the kilobytes of "human readable" text, and then divide by the megabytes over the wire to work out the efficiency. For notoriously slow web apps, this is often 0.5% or worse, even if filtering down to API requests only!

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andrewingram a day ago | parent | next [-]

It is still a major problem, yes. Interestingly, if you go back to the talks that introduced GraphQL, much of the motivation wasn’t about solving overfetching (they kinda assumed you were already doing that because it was at the peak of mobile app wave), but solving the organisational and technical issues with existing solutions.

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rbalicki 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

#1 unnecessary network waterfalls

#2 downloading the same fields multiple times

#3 downloading unneeded data/code

Checks out

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switz 2 days ago | parent [-]

Hilariously – react server components largely solves all three of these problems, but developers don't seem to want to understand how or why, or seem to suggest that they don't solve any real problems.

	▲	andrewingram a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s no secret that RSC was at least partially an attempt to get close to what Relay offers but without requiring you adopt GraphQL.
	▲	rbalicki a day ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		There's an informed critique of RSC, but no one is making it.
	▲	presentation 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I agree though worth noting that data loader patterns in most pre-RSC react meta frameworks + other frameworks also solve for most of these problems without the complexity of RSC. But RSC has many benefits beyond simplifying and optimizing data fetching that it’s too bad HN commenters hate it (and anything frontend related whatsoever) so much.

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gherkinnn a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Overfetching does not lead to those megabytes. And it has nothing to do with the enshittification process of a middleman like Amazon fucking over both customers and sellers.