Incremental rebuilds

Feature requests
3

Is it public somewhere? I’ve seen people with 100k+ pages build their site in 20s
so something is wrong there.

I was wondering after I posted this - it’s an old blog but the amount of pages isn’t that huge.

I’ve made it public:

It’s using the tabi theme - I wonder how much the theme can impact things. I tried running a flamegraph over it but I think I need to make a debug build as it wasn’t very informative - any clues there?

Zola used to have incremental rebuilds but it is very hard to get it working
correctly and at some point a good third of the issues where people not seeing the
updated data in zola serve.

Yeah, that’s not optimal. I understand why it’s hard.

But adding an article to the blog likely does not affect all other blog articles.

Is it though? People can have some “related articles” section or whatever and that
new article would be shown on other articles. If you don’t care too much about
inconsistency when writing, you can use zola serve --fast that will only re-render
the page/section affected.

Yeah, sorry for being unclear but I do understand that. What I meant is that if there’s a way to mark dependencies or a lack of dependencies you can skip a lot of work. That said, it’s risky as any inconsistency would lead to unpredictable results.

So markdown content changes cannot affect other content on the blog; correct?

Nope it can. If you show the summary of a page in a section and you edit one of
the page: the section needs to be re-rendered since its content might have
changed.

Ah, I wasn’t aware of the summary option. I’d cursorily scanned the theme and it wasn’t using this feature so I missed it.

That said, tracking references to page.content and page.summary is more restricted than tracking everything. The problem is that to do that reliably probably requires a static analysis of the templates to see how variables are traced. Anyway, thanks for answering; I knew it was going to be hard but I had hoped the problem could be restricted to make it more tractable. If I have such ideas in the future I shall get back to you. But if I can speed up zola in general it’s not going to matter.

Also since you can fetch any page/section from any template, it’s impossible to
know for sure which template needs to be re-rendered. For quick re-render there’s
zola serve --fast as mentioned before.

That sounds like a useful option!It may be helpful to add a little bit of text to the cli-usage documentation to explain you can do this. I realize it doesn’t document all the CLI options but this sounds like a useful use case to mention.