Vanilla GatsbyV5 takes ~1 minute to build

[DavidSabine]

Preliminary Checks

• This issue is not a duplicate. Before opening a new issue, please search existing issues: https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/issues
• This issue is not a question, feature request, RFC, or anything other than a bug report directly related to Gatsby. Please post those things in GitHub Discussions: https://github.com/gatsbyjs/gatsby/discussions

Description

Gatsby V5, out of the box, takes ~1 minute to build.
gatsby develop time-to-interaction is ~1 minute.

This is an issue.

Reproduction Link

https://github.com/DavidSabine/gatsby5-build-time

Steps to Reproduce

1. npm init
2. npm install gatsby --save-dev
3. gatsby develop

⌚

Expected Result

I expect time-to-interaction is comparable to other SSR frameworks: Vitepress? Svelte? Nextjs?

Actual Result

Time-to-interaction is ~1 minute. That's before adding any content or images.

Given that Vite builds comparable site in milliseconds, it's time Gatsbyjs take a new look at developer experience.

Gatsbyjs in 2018 was amazing: hot-reloading, image processing, well-documented APIs. Putting up with 1-2minutes when running npm run develop was an easy trade-off.

Gatsbyjs entering 2023 is a different story. The productivity gains offered by Vite, Vitest (compared to Webpack, Jest) are significant. It's difficult to justify starting new projects with Gatsby.

Environment

System:
    OS: Linux 5.15 Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS 22.04.1 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)
    CPU: (8) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7820HQ CPU @ 2.90GHz
    Shell: 5.1.16 - /bin/bash
  Binaries:
    Node: 18.12.1 - ~/.asdf/installs/nodejs/18.12.1/bin/node
    Yarn: 1.22.19 - /mnt/c/Program Files/nodejs/yarn
    npm: 8.19.2 - ~/.asdf/plugins/nodejs/shims/npm
  npmPackages:
    gatsby: 5.3.2 => 5.3.2 
  npmGlobalPackages:
    gatsby-cli: 5.3.1

Config Flags

none

[tyhopp]

Thanks for sharing your feedback. Improving time to develop is a metric we track and do look to improve on. The major upgrade from v4 to v5 actually saw a reduction of ~10 seconds by our metrics, so this isn't a problem specific to the recent major release.

[DavidSabine]

Yes, sorry, I didn't mean to suggest a problem with V5. I understand V5 has improved on this metric. Perhaps Webpack has become a crutch?