Scaling AJAX 
April 21st, 2006
There has been quite the discussion in the past few days about a post from Billy Newport where he claimed that
AJAX enabled applications generate a higher load on an application server than a non AJAX applications
James Governor is not convinced, and Nate Schutta has his doubts, while Tim Bray takes the every pragmatic stance of “it depends”.
Wise Uncle Ben said it best when he warned young Peter that with great power comes great responsibility. In general, I think that AJAX lets developers better take advantage of client side processing of data and therefore on a one-on-one showdown of some piece of functionality, which can be implemented with either AJAX or using the old skool Web, then AJAX will win. For an example of this check out the story on AJAXian about MacRumours and their AJAX success.
However, once you decide to start using AJAX to record the mouse position on the client every millisecond then you are just asking for a world of hurt!
I think that AJAX does generally reduce server load if you are just streaming data up to the client for processing and keeping things simple.
