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optimizationbuildjekyll

Jekyll compiling seems WAY too slow

I'm building a site with Jekyll for the first time. I'm loving it so far; my only problem is the exceedingly long build times. Right now, when I run jekyll build, it takes about 30 seconds to generate the site.

30 seconds might not seem like a lot, but at the moment, the entire site only has ONE post, 8 includes, 8 layouts, and 2 small plugins. I haven't abused liquid tags to my knowledge, and if I remove the plugins, it still takes just as long.

When searching for an answer, all I can find are people who have huge blogs with hundreds of posts. Since I only have one post, that's obviously not the issue - there's something else going on here to make it take so long.

Here is my site's github repository: https://github.com/keithpickering/kpd/

My questions are as follows:

  1. What are some possible reasons for Jekyll building so slowly when it doesn't have all that much to build?

  2. If Jekyll is just inherently slow, is there a simple way to compile my CSS and JS separately, leaving Jekyll to deal with just the markup? Right now I have Jekyll ignore my "css" and "js" folders, instead having Grunt minify, prefix, and compile those files automatically. I've also never used Grunt before so I have no idea if this is some sort of absurdly hacky solution that I'm using.

Thanks for the help!

EDIT: Should've mentioned this sooner, but I'm on Windows 8.1 x64. I'm beginning to think Jekyll just has shaky support for Windows.

Solution

  • I ran into a similar problem, but luckily found the reason and a solution:

    My jekyll setup wasn't using any plugins, no complicated liquid tags, only contained 3 sample posts and nothing else. But building the site still took 6 seconds on average.

    Only when I removed everthing in the directory step by step I found out what was causing the long build times: the node_modules folder.

    You can exclude the node_modules directory from the jekyll conversion by putting the following in _config.yml:

    exclude: [node_modules]

    Or:

    exclude:
    - node_modules

    More information about exclude can be found in the jekyll documentation.