I've currently got a controller which passes a model to a view. The view will be making AJAX calls to the controller to make updates to the data rather freqeuently, and the model makes for a rather nice arrangements to make these updates.
I know that making changes to the database in the controller is bad form, and I would like to avoid doing it. However, creating a model on every call and handing the update data off to it, although it seems more correct to me, takes longer on each request, as the model needs to be initialized. Since the user is blocked from interaction with certain elements on the page during the update, this time can really add up across dozens of updates.
Which method is best? Simply making the updates in the controller to keep the application as interactive as possible, or initializing an instance of the model on every request to handle the update at the expense of speedy request processing?