The publication and subscription model makes it fairly easy to receive and send data to the client, but as with every call to the server, sending and requesting data is expensive, as the server and the client both have to process the requests. Therefore, keep a few things in mind when building an app:
Subscribe only to the documents that are necessary to make up the screen.
Avoid sending fields with large content when we don't need them. This keeps our data stream leaner and faster.
If we're using
limitorskipin our publication, we need to make sure we're sorting it on the server so that we get the required data first and not some wrong tail of it.
You also should be aware that the Meteor.publish() function is not reactive. This means you can't use make one cursor depending on the result of another one, like you would mostly do on the client. For example, the following code snippet will not work, as it will never rerun when the comment count in the Posts collection...