You can turn it off with about 10-15 lines of code. It has been a while, but IIRC they just cache and diff way too much data for the reason that it saves bandwidth. Wrap their caching functions to forget the data when you know you don't need it, and Meteor can become much more performant.
Still, I wouldn't use Meteor for any kind of traditional website. It's way too easy to introduce state on the server, but there shouldn't be state on the server, and it's way too easy to abuse reactivity and end up with a toy that tanks with trivial traffic.
I think polling is ultimately a better model because it allows each component to throttle itself at whatever pace is necessary. I can see Meteor being useful for applications that require a shared state on the server (or in Redis or something) like in online games, chat, or any other online multi-user real-time application.
But then Meteor became a tool for common websites that didn't actually need reactivity, and people started abusing server state, reactivity, etc. I think at some point, the community was begging for options to turn reactivity off by default or in certain cases.
Meteor apps consume less data but take up a ton of server resources. Overall, the problems introduced by polling were just traded for DDP's own problems. The problem of "sending data to the client in real time" might not even be an important problem. If the client looks at a page every 20 seconds, then there's no reason for the page to be updating for an empty audience.
I think Meteor is building something called Apollo now which uses some sort of intermediary caching server to keep track of data versions, which the client then polls for updates to the data it depends on. At a first glance, it looks like they just took the problem with DDP and moved it into an independent system. I could be wrong, maybe their polling solution would end up fixing the issues.
> I think Meteor is building something called Apollo
Apollo is a library for GraphQL, primarily client side but there's also a server component (sort of like ExpressJS for GraphQL). While GraphQL also includes real-time web-socket based subscriptions, they are an extension rather than the core, and, in practice, most clients/servers (including Apollo) use polling to fetch updates because it requires a much simpler server architecture.
Still, I wouldn't use Meteor for any kind of traditional website. It's way too easy to introduce state on the server, but there shouldn't be state on the server, and it's way too easy to abuse reactivity and end up with a toy that tanks with trivial traffic.
I think polling is ultimately a better model because it allows each component to throttle itself at whatever pace is necessary. I can see Meteor being useful for applications that require a shared state on the server (or in Redis or something) like in online games, chat, or any other online multi-user real-time application.
But then Meteor became a tool for common websites that didn't actually need reactivity, and people started abusing server state, reactivity, etc. I think at some point, the community was begging for options to turn reactivity off by default or in certain cases.
Meteor apps consume less data but take up a ton of server resources. Overall, the problems introduced by polling were just traded for DDP's own problems. The problem of "sending data to the client in real time" might not even be an important problem. If the client looks at a page every 20 seconds, then there's no reason for the page to be updating for an empty audience.
I think Meteor is building something called Apollo now which uses some sort of intermediary caching server to keep track of data versions, which the client then polls for updates to the data it depends on. At a first glance, it looks like they just took the problem with DDP and moved it into an independent system. I could be wrong, maybe their polling solution would end up fixing the issues.