How much JSON is too much JSON?

Question

I am developing a bookmark site like delicious. In order to provide a better and a faster user experience to the user, i am grabbing all the bookmarks from the db table and form a json object with all the bookmark information in it. Eg, for each bookmark, i have an id, title, url, description, tags etc. The json object is already formed on the first page load. I then get the output json, use jquery.each to style and inject relevant html on the fly.

Right now, i have no option to test it so here comes my question: imagining there is no limits on the number of bookmarks a user can save, what would be the effect on this structure on the browser (or any other problems that might arise for this situation) if a user has, say, 2000 bookmarks also considering that paging is not an option for this particular project.

Answer 1

Probably controversial but anyway. How can paging not be an option? When is it ever relevant to show 2k bookmarks at a time? I'd say never.

When you're returning that much data (of course it depends on how much text) you're wide open to DDOS attacks. Imagine an attacker that gets hold of a url containing several megabytes of json, it would not be that hard to sink your servers.

It would be nice with some more information on your UI so we can analyze what data you really need.