Webpack performance

sage
1

Hey guys, been using sage for a few years. Its so fantastic, makes working with Wordpress make more sense!

Recently started a project using Sage 9 and its my first time using webpack. I can’t believe how slow it is to compile when a .scss files changes. I was getting 30 second compile times, I sacrificed source maps to make it 10-20 seconds now.

I don’t get it, what am I doing wrong? I know webpack does a lot more then say, Gulp, but if this is just how it is, I don’t understand why anybody would use this over near instant compile times of Sage 8’s gulp compile times. What am I missing?

1 Like
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  • How are you running webpack?: On Linux, macOS or on Windows (node for Windows or WSL) or some more exotic setup like Vagrant (VirtualBox hypervisor with shared folders/CIFS mount)?
  • Is the CPU completely in use when building (all cores)?
  • Are you using a recent node version?
  • Are the source files/project on a SSD drive or on a VM shared folder/CIFS network mount?
3
  • I’m running webpack on node for windows
  • My cpu goes up about 10% while compiling. Not sure how to measure individual cores
  • node version is 8.9.0
  • Source files are on my laptops SSD

Ironically my JS compiles are actually quite speedy… usually less 1.5s. So I do think its specific to SASS somehow.

4

Does a brand new copy of Sage (without any additional changes) also take a long time to compile? Could you narrow the compile time down to a particular file or line?

5

Yep, just tried it out, its the same compile times on avg. Is this not normal then for other people? Does webpack have built in debugging or compile times that I could use to narrow things down?

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Mines take 3-5 seconds to compile when running webpack --watch (or yarn run start). I’m on a Mac with MacOS 10.13.3, 8GB ram and SSD.

7

Well that’s good to know. Since I’m new at webpack, I at least now know that there is something wrong. I’ll try and figure out how to diagnose webpack. Thanks!

8

Well, just to follow up on this… I never could get the performance below 15s unfortunately. That’s with source maps and resolve-url turned off.

I did forget to mention that while my files are local, a vagrant machine is running and has access to those files via a shared folder. I don’t think this should in theory affect things though as I’m running node locally with files on my local hard drive. Generally my vagrant web server is a bit slower at read/write operations though.

I ended up moving my local development to a not so local solution and use a mac-mini I have around for testing and mobile app dev. After transitioning things over there my compile times have gone down to < 3s with source maps on. Maybe vagrant does affect my local files’s speeds? I can’t wait for WSL to get their disk performance figured out!

Anyway thanks for the help, just wanted to follow though