16 · Pagination and capacity

Up to a point, the entry listings fetched every entry. With a dozen that is elegant simplicity. With a hundred and twenty it is a noticeable response weight. With a thousand it would stop working.

Pagination went in on the server, not in the browser. The distinction matters, because the browser version looks identical and is easier, but it downloads everything first and then pretends it did not. It solves the impression, not the problem.

The effect is a response of constant size regardless of how many entries the site has. That lifted the only constraint that grew along with the author's body of work — and that changes the character of the tool. A site that starts to slow down after three years of writing is a tool for one season.

We did a capacity calculation while we were at it, because we would rather know the ceiling than discover it. With the response size limit lifted, the bottleneck became the size of the code bundle — and entries are compiled into it. That works out to an order of a few thousand entries on the free plan, and several times that on the paid one, which costs about as much as a coffee a month.

For an author writing an entry a day, a few thousand entries is years of work. The ceiling exists, but it is high and we know exactly where it is — and that is the only form in which a ceiling stops being a problem.