Comment by jiggawatts
Comment by jiggawatts 2 days ago
> overfetching is never such a big problem
Wait, what? Overfetching is easily one of the top #3 reasons for the enshittification on the modern web! It's one of the primary causes of incredible slowdowns we've all experienced.
Just go to any slow web app, press F12 and look at the megabytes transferred on the network tab. Copy-paste all text on the screen and save it to a file. Count the kilobytes of "human readable" text, and then divide by the megabytes over the wire to work out the efficiency. For notoriously slow web apps, this is often 0.5% or worse, even if filtering down to API requests only!
It is still a major problem, yes. Interestingly, if you go back to the talks that introduced GraphQL, much of the motivation wasn’t about solving overfetching (they kinda assumed you were already doing that because it was at the peak of mobile app wave), but solving the organisational and technical issues with existing solutions.