I realise this is snark about the article going down, but it's actually a good point too. Not much point in optimising the client side if all your dynamic requests take a second for the server to process.
Good point. I once spent three months developing a highly optimized dynamically loading Google Maps point & line overlay library capable of smoothly scrolling through thousands of elements with hundreds on screen on 10 year old single-core Pentiums.
In the end the server team ended up implementing a home-grown geo-search on an XML document store with an average query time of several seconds.
