Hi. Hugo build time is quite slow for my website at this moment, and I don’t have millions of articles.
hugo server -D -F --renderToDisk -d "/local/build/path"
Building sites …
| FR
+------------------+------+
Pages | 277
Paginator pages | 9
Non-page files | 759
Static files | 1734
Processed images | 444
Aliases | 3
Sitemaps | 1
Cleaned | 0
Total in 129974 ms
As @brunoamaral, I have a custom theme with almost the same list of features (a bit less in fact). I use partialCached function (website repo here). Image processing and static file copy seems to be responsible of most of the build time. The problem is even more important if you have taxonomy enabled and a lot of taxonomy list pages generated (e.g. one list of article for every tag). So If you process images, have a lot of static files in your website, and taxonomy pages, you should include this in your benchmark
It seems that on a mac, the static file copy and the caching of the processed images is more optimized. So the “first build time” drop drastically the second time you run the build command. I run on a windows surface 3, not a lightning bolt, and not a mac, but a mac user built my site twice on his mac and reported a drop from 21 seconds to 2 sec. I talk about this issue on github and on this forum.