Fixing Jekyll Build Time
I had slightly neglected this blog for a while - I had a lot of drafts and random notes about the place because my local build for Jekyll was taking 12 to 40 minutes to build. I had a few hours to kill so it was finally time to give this a bit of time.
A good way to analyze where the problems are are to run jekyll serve --profile which indicates the build time for each file. From the below, you can see that my problems were quite clearly in the _layouts/post.html and _includes\post\related_posts.html
C:\Users\twulz\Documents\GitHub\Twulz.github.io>jekyll serve --profile
Configuration file: C:/Users/twulz/Documents/GitHub/Twulz.github.io/_config.yml
Source: .
Destination: ./_site
Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
Generating...
Populating LSI...
Rebuilding index...
Liquid Warning: Liquid syntax error (line 12): Expected id but found number in "post in site.categories.3dprinter reversed" in engprojects/printer/index.html
Filename | Count | Bytes | Time
-----------------------------------------------------------+-------+----------+--------
_layouts/post.html | 44 | 599.33K | 460.732
_includes/post/related_posts.html | 47 | 49.28K | 460.347
_layouts/default.html | 70 | 2488.55K | 1.384
_includes/asides.html | 70 | 1218.98K | 0.819
_includes/asides/archive_tabs.html | 70 | 927.09K | 0.406
_includes/libs/list_tags | 115 | 626.27K | 0.340
_includes/asides/recent_posts.html | 70 | 223.95K | 0.224
_includes/post/post_meta.html | 47 | 62.29K | 0.204
_includes/libs/list_categories | 115 | 319.73K | 0.189
_includes/navbar.html | 72 | 207.82K | 0.102
_includes/head.html | 72 | 132.12K | 0.085
_includes/bottom.html | 72 | 95.03K | 0.083
atom.xml | 1 | 467.32K | 0.077
_includes/libs/list_pages | 3 | 63.25K | 0.076
blog/tags.html | 1 | 53.31K | 0.064
assets/bootstrap-2.1.1/js/bootstrap.custom.js | 1 | 18.45K | 0.055
index.html | 1 | 9.07K | 0.040
blog/categories.html | 1 | 26.63K | 0.039
_includes/post/post_pagenation.html | 47 | 22.76K | 0.032
_includes/post/socials_large.html | 47 | 63.38K | 0.032
assets/js/script.js | 1 | 4.50K | 0.029
assets/bootstrap-2.3.2/js/bootstrap.custom.js | 1 | 27.96K | 0.028
_includes/asides/tweets.html | 70 | 38.62K | 0.024
_posts/2016-02-18-rediscovering-the-blog.md | 1 | 18.79K | 0.020
blog/archives.html | 1 | 11.14K | 0.019
page4/index.html | 1 | 8.20K | 0.018
_includes/script.html | 72 | 23.91K | 0.018
_includes/footer.html | 72 | 13.08K | 0.017
page3/index.html | 1 | 9.37K | 0.016
page2/index.html | 1 | 8.91K | 0.015
_includes/header.html | 72 | 12.16K | 0.014
sitemap.xml | 1 | 10.50K | 0.014
assets/css/style.css | 1 | 9.11K | 0.014
_layouts/single-no-sidebar.html | 2 | 20.15K | 0.013
page5/index.html | 1 | 3.56K | 0.010
_layouts/single-with-sidebar.html | 3 | 9.23K | 0.010
_includes/libs/truncate_exec | 5 | 1.49K | 0.009
_includes/post/comment.html | 47 | 0.00K | 0.009
assets/bootstrap-2.3.2/css/bootstrap.custom.css | 1 | 103.51K | 0.009
assets/bootstrap-2.3.2/css/bootstrap-responsive.custom.css | 1 | 16.57K | 0.006
_includes/asides/about.html | 70 | 13.95K | 0.005
home.html | 1 | 2.01K | 0.005
rss.xml | 1 | 7.53K | 0.004
engprojects/other/index.html | 1 | 1.58K | 0.002
_includes/asides/github.html | 70 | 13.81K | 0.002
_includes/libs/truncate_start | 5 | 0.00K | 0.002
_includes/pagenation.html | 5 | 1.39K | 0.002
_includes/libs/thumbnail | 5 | 0.00K | 0.002
engprojects/printer/index.html | 1 | 1.52K | 0.002
_includes/libs/truncate_end | 5 | 0.00K | 0.001
done in 471.247 seconds.
Auto-regeneration: enabled for '.'
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/2.5.0/fileutils.rb:90: warning: already initialized constant FileUtils::VERSION
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/fileutils-1.2.0/lib/fileutils/version.rb:4: warning: previous definition of VERSION was here
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/2.5.0/x64-mingw32/etc.so: warning: already initialized constant Struct::Passwd
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/2.5.0/fileutils.rb:1188: warning: already initialized constant FileUtils::Entry_::S_IF_DOOR
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/fileutils-1.2.0/lib/fileutils.rb:1267: warning: previous definition of S_IF_DOOR was here
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/2.5.0/fileutils.rb:1444: warning: already initialized constant FileUtils::Entry_::DIRECTORY_TERM
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/fileutils-1.2.0/lib/fileutils.rb:1545: warning: previous definition of DIRECTORY_TERM was here
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/2.5.0/fileutils.rb:1448: warning: already initialized constant FileUtils::Entry_::SYSCASE
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/fileutils-1.2.0/lib/fileutils.rb:1549: warning: previous definition of SYSCASE was here
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/2.5.0/fileutils.rb:1501: warning: already initialized constant FileUtils::OPT_TABLE
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/fileutils-1.2.0/lib/fileutils.rb:1602: warning: previous definition of OPT_TABLE was here
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/2.5.0/fileutils.rb:1555: warning: already initialized constant FileUtils::LOW_METHODS
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/fileutils-1.2.0/lib/fileutils.rb:1656: warning: previous definition of LOW_METHODS was here
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/2.5.0/fileutils.rb:1562: warning: already initialized constant FileUtils::METHODS
C:/Ruby25-x64/lib/ruby/gems/2.5.0/gems/fileutils-1.2.0/lib/fileutils.rb:1663: warning: previous definition of METHODS was here
Server address: http://127.0.0.1:4000
Server running... press ctrl-c to stop.
The problem seemed to be the loop in the related_posts; when I set this to be 1 instead of 5 I got the build time down to 8 minutes and was only a few seconds with the loop completely removed so this was definitely the source of the problem.
<nav id="related-posts" class="well">
<h3>You might also like</h3>
<ul>
<li class="related-post">
<span>October 10, 2021</span> -
<a href="/things/garden/othergarden/2021/10/10/replanting-seedlings-cayenne.html">Replanting the Seedlings - Cayenne Chillies and Strawberries</a>
</li>
<li class="related-post">
<span>September 26, 2021</span> -
<a href="/things/garden/othergarden/2021/09/26/replanting-seedlings-birdseye.html">Replanting the Seedlings - Birdseye Chillies</a>
</li>
<li class="related-post">
<span>September 12, 2021</span> -
<a href="/things/garden/othergarden/2021/09/12/replanting-seedlings-tomatoes.html">Replanting the Seedlings - Tomatoes</a>
</li>
<li class="related-post">
<span>September 08, 2021</span> -
<a href="/things/garden/seedlings/2021/09/08/planting-seeds.html">Planting Tomato, Strawberry and Chilli Seeds</a>
</li>
<li class="related-post">
<span>August 31, 2021</span> -
<a href="/things/software/server-app/2021/08/31/jenkins-updates.html">Jenkins Updates for the Server-App</a>
</li>
</ul>
</nav>
I posted all of this info on a Stack Overflow Question as I was at my wits’ end - I could have removed the related posts loop but I wanted a more long-term solution. A friendly user pointed out that as GitHub Pages doesn’t support lsi anyway, setting lsi:false in my _config.yml file was enough to allow my local builds to cut down to 15 seconds.
# Configuration for jekyll
# NOTICE: GitHub forces to set `safe: true` in order to prohibit using plugins.
safe: false
source: .
destination: ./_site
plugins_dir: ./_plugins
lsi: false
kramdown:
input: GFM
syntax_highlighter: rouge
excerpt_separator: <!--more-->
repository: Twulz/Twulz.github.io