I’m not sure you’re going to get a solid “You should do it this way” answer to this. It’s all about maximizing your goals because at the end of the day the question is more about… where are you willing to take the performance hit?
200+ articles can slow down a page render if everything is handled on the client side. All of those items are still there… still need to be rendered, then hidden, then displayed in increments of X… etc.
But pushing everything server-side just asks the server to do all the heavy lifting, which is not without its own consequences. Now the database is seeing more activity per page load; is that activity enough to cause a significant performance issue? That’s going to depend a lot on what all is being done (how many tables are being queried per page load, how many page loads per time period, etc, etc).
My personal preference is server-side for any type of large output. I’ve noticed that tabular data in particular can become sluggish when you’re trying to load several hundred rows.
