I've been looking into building a sample Facebook Connect app recently for experimentation and showcase use.

One thing I encountered in recent projects is the seemingly slow speed of profile images loaded via Flash.

The one thing that I've found that is a potential 'bottleneck' to this problem is the way Facebook Connect is used on the site.

Essentially the fundamental difference from our recent projects is that we used PHP client side library which proxies all information into the server before being served to client side. Facebook provides a javascript based implementation as well.

Based on the above information you can basically tell that proxying is a speed bottleneck and an inefficient way to present what's essentially the user's information to the user only. Javascript solves the issue as it is a request from the client's browser to Facebook directly.

Based on this theory, it should be obvious that php client library should only be used if the server has to manipulate, store or doing any information processing before the information is presented to the end user. Javascript library should be used whenever information should be presented to the end user first.

I'm in the middle of proving this theory. Will update once result is known.

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