Okay, preliminary testing at scale with a lean theme and simple content (Mac OS 10.11.6, Hugo v0.26, 2.8 GHz Core i5, 16 GB RAM, SSD):
As published, the site has about 18,000 content pages. I took the largest section (~13,000 recipes) and duplicated it 10 times, raising the count to over 150,000 content pages.
Normal:
% rm -rf public; time hugo
Started building sites ...
Built site for language en:
0 draft content
0 future content
0 expired content
17781 regular pages created
409 other pages created
0 non-page files copied
2773 paginator pages created
359 categories created
total in 24286 ms
real 0m24.808s
user 0m54.095s
sys 0m10.862s
% find public -type f | wc -l
21011
Scaled up:
% rm -rf public; time hugo
Started building sites ...
Built site for language en:
0 draft content
0 future content
0 expired content
153071 regular pages created
579 other pages created
0 non-page files copied
23882 paginator pages created
359 categories created
total in 468720 ms
real 7m49.740s
user 22m33.384s
sys 2m2.473s
% find public -type f | wc -l
177580
8.6 times as many content pages took 19 times as long to build, which isn’t really surprising, since it was using 6.53 GB of RAM, and copying the exact same content into multiple sections significantly increased the size of the taxonomies (and large taxonomies are slow). A spot check suggests all the pages were built correctly.
-j