Why is Next.js so slow??

it's getting to the point where I can just feel that an app is using server components when I use it nearly 1 second page navigations i'm sure it could be improved but I've yet to come across a server component app in the wild that feels good it's about to save Vzero but I just checked and I'm not even sure they're using them anymore as per usual DAX is mostly right slightly inflammatory and not showing the whole picture in this particular instance i think there's a lot to dive into here i agree with him that most of the server component apps I have seen have been really really rough but I don't agree this is the fault of server components i'm going to say something a little

controversial on this one i think the blame for the slow server component sites falls less on the next team on Verscell and certainly less on the React team and the people working on server components directly and more on people like me in order for this to work and work well we need to deeply understand how server components behave and what they mean for us as developers because there is no excuse for any website to be as slow as this one is it almost feels like we've gone back in time to the way

pages worked before i want to break down what makes sites like this so slow how we got here in the first place and most importantly how to use server components correctly so that we can have the fastest possible websites while also matching the great DX that we expect from tools like React and Next.js sadly developer experience doesn't pay the bills i've learned that lesson enough times so we're going to do a quick word from today's sponsor right before we dive in building apps has never been easier thanks to all these AI tools and deploying them has never been easier too at least until you need to add a CDN a

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video is inspired by a lot of the push back I'm seeing on server components obviously this and the performance side that's the most important piece but also complaints like Michael Jackson from the Remix team saying that server components are nice in theory but they're not working out evan here saying that server components aren't necessarily a problem they unlock cool patterns but the overhead is the issue here and me responding with probably too many words to Dax's post trying to break down what happened and how we got here i could

just read this to you and believe me part of me was tempted to just read this out considering especially how positive the attention and feedback was to it but I'd rather go in detail on how we got here and why these apps are so slow i'm going to do a real brief history of the web if you want a deeper version of this I have a long video that I think is genuinely super underappreciated all the ways HTML gets to your browser i think this is one of my best videos even if I don't look like that anymore if you want a deep dive on all of this check that