On a high traffic site, I supposed the lighter-weight processing and
response of an ajax request could have a significant impact (although
server-side caching would probably change that). But for the average
site/webapp, I would question the assumption that ajax is in fact
faster. Bandwidth, and server-side rendering of html is only a small
part of the overhead that occurs with every request.
I would argue that the perceived speed increase is at least partly
psychological. We are influenced by the fact that you don't get a
subtle flicker with every page reload, or the "page loading"
indicator isn't active. And if a specific request has the potential
to be "slow", with ajax the developer has the opportunity to give
feedback to the user in a controlled way instead of defaulting to the
browser progress indicator. This kind of thing can make the
application appear more responsive. I think small things like this
can have a big impact on perceived seamlessness and speed of an
application.
-- Dell
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