The problem is that the first load can absolutely kill everything and having second request served faster won't help. (e.g. me opening GMail in Indonesia and n

The problem is that the first load can absolutely kill everything and having second request served faster won't help. (e.g. me opening GMail in Indonesia and never being able to load it) I dislike the general SPAs are faster "truth". They might, they might not and the initial load can be just too much. You can sure spend time to optimize SPA to perform well though. Btw Turbolinks tries to solve this "do not parse JS again" thing and it's where the speed comes from.