Backbone.js Bootstrapping collections: How much is too much?

Question

In Backbone when bootstrapping collections, how do I determine what is too much? Would it be a bad idea to bootstrap 10,000 member records and 300,000 photo records? I'm not sure how to decide how much is too much.

Answer 1

If all you're doing is displaying the content, just bootstrap enough to fill a generous size page and lazy load the rest. If you're doing something interactive (e.g. sorting or filtering) in the browser, then you might still be able to get away with that strategy, provided that

• users will typically want to at least glance at the data for a few seconds before activating a sort or filter, and
• your server is fast enough to fill in the remaining items (after the first "page-full") in that time.