Show HN: My sans-JavaScript server dashboard (opens in new tab)

(notryan.com)

12 pointsryanmjacobs6y ago9 comments

9 comments

9 comments · 4 top-level

quickthrower26y ago· 5 in thread

I am not sure I follow. It's 3 images, so you manually refresh every 5 minutes (maybe that can be automated with meta-refresh so avoiding JS, although I don't see that much advantage over setTimeout?)

ryanmjacobsOP6y ago

Ah, I should have explained better. Page load isn't really my main concern. I used to embed dynamic graphs (Metabase or D3.js) and my laptop would lag like crazy plotting all of those points and allowing for hover tooltips (which were nifty but didn't provide me much utility). I use R in the backend and it plots 10,000 points in a fraction of a second. Web browsers only have to fetch and display an image.

tl;dr I have fast bandwidth -- but I have an old CPU.

quickthrower26y ago

Thanks for explaining. I quite like it. Given a rarely updating but detailed graph this would perform better. But you do lose the interactivity benefits of JS.

A candlestick approach might allow you to reduce the amount of data to send to the client in d3 if you use R to aggregate the data first.

Have fun!

th3o6a1d6y ago

Do you need to display 10,000 data points?

fish456y ago

I wonder how much WASM would help

sosodev6y ago

Yeah, I understand single page app levels of JavaScript but why complicate things to save a few lines?

_bxg16y ago

The whole reason people don't like JavaScript weighing down their pages is because they take longer to load. Loading three large images for every update can't be better.

darekkay6y ago

I'd like to point out that this solution is inaccessible to users with impaired vision. That's probably okay for you (because only you are interested in the data), but this makes the solution insufficient for any public usage.

arcturus176y ago

I can assure you the difference in load times between this and using a battle-tested library like D3.js will be imperceptible to the user. You could even throw a thin React app around it, and it would still be blazing fast to the eye.

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