PouchDB's replication capability is interesting, but is there a way to make it lazy load to the local DB instead of doing everything up front? I hesitate to use it for a web project with 10+ MB of docs where it would otherwise be ideal.
You can provide a server-side filter function to replication and progressively filter partial replications until eventually everything gets replicated. At that point it becomes a question of architecture of your documents: how much is needed to replicate before a user may be productive?
You can also explore pouchdb-replication-stream to build bundles that PouchDB can bootstrap from a little bit faster than a chatty replication.
That said, I've found initial replications of large databases (one I've worked with this week is a 25+ MB CouchDB database full of photos) is quick enough (and mostly bandwidth constrained) that I haven't had much in the way of concern over it.
