What, really, is the most data a single webpage can (should) handle?
It never really occurred to me until I began one of my largest website projects and started designing the structure for each page. What is the most that a single webpage should be able to handle?
For a particular page on my website (the user profile page, to be precise) I'd like to have an information packed dashboard. Some info about the page:
- Dashboard with live statistics
- Inbox with PM messages
- Notifications for every like and comment they received
- Order history (elaborate table with tons of info)
- Purchase history (as above)
- Account preferences (forms for each email/preferences and changing pass/profile image)
- All their posts and listings (with up to 10 images each)
- The website has about 50 tables in the database. This page alone would likely take info from about 34-40 tables
- The page uses Ajax so most interactions will be done without page refreshes
- ...And some more
That doesn't look as much as I thought it to be but trust me, it's a lot. The page would probably consist of around 7000+ lines of code. Of course that includes the CSS and JavaScript, PHP, MySQL and html.
Should I go ahead with this, or would the page break for slower connections almost too often and be more of a nuisance?
One thing I could do is to only download the content of each tab when a user clicks on it, but if it's okay I'd like all the loading to be done when the user arrives on the page.