Which SSG builds Markdown the fastest? (Blog post with charts/data)

This one’s by Eleventy creator/maintainer Zach Leatherman. Check the chart. Spoiler alert, using his own words:

Hugo remains the undisputed speed champ—no question about that.

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If we’re the “undisputed speed champ” may up for discussion, but I’m currently working on the next Hugo version who will scale more less linearly whatever amount of pages/date you throw at it. This will not make the 50 page blog build any faster, though, but it may allow the million page newspaper to finish without out of memory errors.

I have not read the entire post by Zach, but I suspect the conclusion is in the line of “who cares if it takes 1 vs 20 seconds to build your blog …” And that may be right. But I see 10K pages documentation sites building on Netlify where build time is money.

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Pretty cool stuff re that upcoming version! I can think of a number of users, notably that fellow in Pennsylvania who runs a news site with Hugo, who’ll be glad to see it.

As for Zach’s conclusions: actually, he mainly just let the numbers speak for themselves, although he did allow himself to cast a little shade on the SPA-oriented SSGs which, of course, were the slowest of the bunch:

Generators that create per-page JavaScript bundles (for single page apps, primarily) are usually slower to build, unsurprisingly. Heavier pages aren’t exclusively slower for end users—they’re slower for developers too.

The thing I’m working on will be generally useful, though. It’s not just about “many pages”, but also about tackling (many) large data files, which is a more common use case.

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