Some implementations provide placeholders that are quick to render (e.g. a single static image, no deep DOM/view tree) to work around this kind of thing. In my

Some implementations provide placeholders that are quick to render (e.g. a single static image, no deep DOM/view tree) to work around this kind of thing. In my experience on both android and web it tends to work pretty well - even very low-end hardware can do this quickly enough to be invisible, and if you are able to drop down into something that can do instanced rendering it's about as close to "free" as possible. Whether the placeholders look any good is a different issue. We generally thought they looked / transitioned to real content a lot worse than showing nothing, and eventually just ripped them out. But e.g. Pinterest did it fairly successfully for a long time (they tended to replace images with a solid image-background-color so the content just kinda emerged. neat effect, but works far better with product images than user-generated content :) ) But ultimately, when you exceed your tolerances, you have to render something or nothing, or disallow it (e.g. block everything). You just have to choose which one. The point where you exceed will shift depending on what you're using/doing, but it always exists.