React on Rails Performance Demo

Desktop reports use 50 ms artificial DB delay to emulate real-world load

This demo app is small and fast — under normal conditions all three rendering strategies score similarly on desktop. PageSpeed Insights does not throttle CPU or network on desktop, so it cannot surface the performance differences that matter in production. Adding ?delay=50 to every page injects a 50 ms sleep after each database query, simulating the heavier queries and higher latency of a real-world application. This makes the RSC streaming advantage clearly visible in Lighthouse scores. The 50 ms delay emulates typical database latency and API response times seen in production applications under load.

Metric RSC SSR Δ
Performance score 98 84 -14%
First Contentful Paint 441 ms 337 ms -24%
Largest Contentful Paint 912 ms 956 ms +5%
Total Blocking Time ★ 11 ms 344 ms +3027%
Cumulative Layout Shift 0.0 0.0 +0%
Speed Index 1.28 s 875 ms -32%
Script Bootup 168 ms 561 ms +234%
Total Transfer 425 KB 791 KB +86%

★ Blocking Time has the biggest impact on Google's performance score (30%) — it measures how long users wait before they can tap, scroll, or type (LCP 25%, CLS 25%, FCP 10%, SI 10%).

RSC Desktop · restaurant_1_rsc-desktop
SSR Desktop · restaurant_1_ssr-desktop