Web Performance on a Budget: Bundle Size, API Limits, and Database Indexes
The three budgets every web app hits: bundle size, API rate limits, and database index selectivity. Learn the formulas, thresholds, and PR checklist. Introduction Every web app has three budgets, and only one of them lives in your code. The bundle budget lives in the browser — 244 kB gzip is where Lighthouse starts penalizing Time to Interactive. The API budget lives at the provider — 5,000…
Web applications have three budgets: bundle size, API rate limits, and database index selectivity. Bundle size lives in the browser, API rate limits are set by the provider, and database index selectivity is determined by the planner. Exceeding any of these budgets results in slower performance, error messages, or timeouts. These budgets are interconnected through averaging, which can obscure the true impact of a choice.
This guide provides formulas, thresholds, and a PR checklist to manage each budget, along with calculators to evaluate and verify the results.
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