[Moo] How big is too big for an object?

[Ryan Florence]

So I've got a site that's got something along the lines of the Mii  
creation tool on the Wii.  There's a stage where the user adds images  
by category (hat, hair, glasses, etc.) and moves them around to  
wherever they like.

At the moment I'm bringing in each category via Request.HTML and then  
just updating the div that displays all the different items (like hair  
styles).  Each element (or hair style) had it's database info in an  
attribute of the element.

We had this discussion a few days ago, and it's got me thinking. So I  
was switching the request to Request.JSON and then drawing the  
elements out via javascript (instead of echoing it out in PHP via  
Request.HTML).  Then I had all my data in an object and didn't have to  
worry about using an attribute on the element.

Then I thought, "Why not just load the entire database of items into  
an object, then just deal with it all client side?"

Our plan is to eventually have thousands and thousands of items,  
that's why I went with request so that I didn't have to load them all  
in unless the user selected the category.

I'm entirely tempted to use Asset.Images in accordance with a big fat  
object that contains all my database instead. Is there ever a concern  
of how big the object will be?  It's certainly going to be less space  
the images it loads.

-Ryan