This week on the Browsertech Podcast, I talked to Breck Fresen and Billy Littlefield of Row Zero about Row Zero, a browser-based spreadsheet that is built to be responsive even at billions of rows.
To do this, they give each spreadsheet its own EC2 instance, which loads the entire sheet into memory. This is reminiscent of a session backend, and is a big contrast to what other browser-based spreadsheets like Google Sheets do, which is to run the spreadsheet engine on the client:
Breck: Many people think of [Google Sheets] as a hosted product, but all the compute is actually happening in JavaScript on your laptop. That's one of the reasons that it's so slow, and even slower than desktop Excel.
Most serious spreadsheet users use desktop Excel, like all the New York i-bankers, none of them are using Google Sheets. And a big reason is performance.
With Row Zero, we don't run client side, we run in the cloud. So when you create a new workbook, we're spinning up compute in AWS behind the scenes. And we can scale that thing up as big as your model or your data set needs to be, and so that that's really where the performance is that, (1) we're not running in JavaScript.
It's written in Rust, it’s not happening in JavaScript in the browser. And (2), we’re not constrained to the CPU and memory resources of your laptop. It's running on an arbitrarily large server on the cloud.
To make it responsive, they move the compute closer to where the user is:
