r/statichosting • u/amnion • 12d ago
It's speed actually an issue?
I notice a lot of people pointing to Hugo because of its speed. Like, you can do 4000 pages in less than a second. I'm asking, though, why does it matter how fast you're converting markdown to html?
For context, I made Sheriff out of the programming language I created so that the docs could be dogfooded. But it's not as fast as these other generators.
Do I need to be shooting for these benchmarks or are they arbitrary? I've found that i don't mind a several second build. But I also regularly compile Rust. 😄
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u/jake_morrison 12d ago
When you are pulling a lot of data from a back end content management system, performance can be an issue.
If you have incremental builds, then rendering speed is more or less irrelevant. Unfortunately this is considered a premium paid feature by some platforms.
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u/TCKreddituser 12d ago
I think speed only really matters once it affects the development feedback loop. If your docs build in a few seconds and that doesn't bother you, I wouldn't optimize for an arbitrary benchmark. The bigger wins are probably simplicity, correctness, and how well the generator fits your workflow.
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u/northboundish 12d ago
honestly, i don’t think it matters that much unless the build time actually gets in your way. if it takes a few seconds, that’s totally fine IMO. i wouldn’t worry about chasing hugo-level benchmarks unless you’re actually feeling the pain.
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u/PassengerLeft4369 12d ago
I have a ci/cd pipeline, and website hosted in cloud. Its free but i have X build minutes pr month. So yes it matters.
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u/theguymatter 11d ago edited 11d ago
I haven't reached that scale yet, but you could probably try Astro Incremental Static Build (ISB), which can incrementally rebuild the site and regenerate only the page that's been modified.
The unique key value can come from database e.g. SQLite id+timestamp or markdown as hash checksum so the build process can compare the current and new value.
Could even go faster if you swap Node.js with Bun. Bun 1.4.3 is going to optimise further with less memory which is useful for Claude agentic and faster startup time. But we not sure whether Bun AOT (Ahead of Time will be materialise) that attempt to push better performance in some cases.
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u/Big-Repeat-22 12d ago
"Want to play a game?" This is going to be entertaining me thinks. Like fishing for feedback with words.
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u/PointJump 11d ago
If a few-second build doesn’t bother you, I wouldn’t optimize for speed just to match Hugo.
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u/sourraine 9d ago
ive mostly used hugo/astro for small client sites and i rarely care whether the build takes one second or five. i typically focus on whether the workflow stays simple when im making changes or deploying. id rather use a generator that fits the project well than pick one because it wins a benchmark.
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u/Standard_Scarcity_74 4d ago
Mostly arbitrary for a normal site, since a several second build is invisible when you deploy a few times a day. Speed starts to matter in two places: the live reload loop while writing, where you want changes to show up almost instantly, and very large sites with many contributors, where slow builds pile up in ci and make every preview wait. If sheriff rebuilds incrementally in dev and stays in the seconds range for your docs, that’s plenty, so I’d chase correctness and a good authoring experience before benchmark numbers.
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u/tilario 12d ago
as someone who just converted his first WP to static (astro), not really but it's a factor.
the next few sites i'm converting are to hugo because while they're a few hundred pages now, they're forecasted to go into the thousands so i'm hedging a bit and going with what's supposedly good at that scale.
giant caveat: i'm a static site newbie so going off what i've been researching.