Agonizingly long rebuilds are back

I’m not done yet, but I’ve been working on a guide on how to profile+optimize Meteor reload speeds and some specific areas that I think have room for improvement. The “Bandaid Solutions” section might help you get some quick gains.

I’m on 1.3.5.1 and my rebuild times are fine (although not as good as the 1.0 days). I have to admit, hearing horror stories like these is one reason I haven’t upgraded to 1.4 yet.

I’m curious, does any one know if MDG is committed to solving this issue? Aren’t they 100% tied up with Apollo these days, and post 1.5 it seems there’s no looking back right?

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I agree, it does seem as though the build times have just gotten slower, and slower with each release. I remember the old days when by the time my fingers had left the Ctrl + S keys the app was already practically reloading… Those were the days, eh?

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Good to know that the release meant to improve things seems to slow things down even more :smiley:
I just wish they would stop putting effort into stuff like the chromatic component explorer and investigate in the stuff that actually keeps us from using Meteor in real projects…

I think this issue is very serious. MDG should fix the reload times before than anything. In the non-meteor community the reload times are instantaneous!

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Didn’t know I was this lucky, my rebuild times are only around ~15 seconds.

Still, this is the biggest pain in my every day life now, and seriously slowing everything down. I built a small side project without Meteor and got used to the 1-second rebuilds: coming back to Meteor felt like a slap in the face.

This should be a critical issue, meaning that everything else drops until this is resolved.

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I’ve opened an issue on Meteor’s repository https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/7665

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Can we please have everyone in the entire world add a thumbs up reaction on this ticket? kthxbye

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Post created to achieve that goal We need everyone's help [slow build times].

We need to do everything we can put this first in the agenda!

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Most San Fran tech startups are big believers in healthy living; MDG has found a way to engineer it …

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The issue was updated by Benjamin:

Meteor 1.4.2 will focus on rebuild performance.

There are multiple issues addressing more specific parts of this problem already (e.g. #7493). We don’t need another one. We do, however, need community members who are willing to help diagnose and fix the problem.

So that’s good news. And I get that Meteor is open source and MDG would like contributions from the community, but often times the people who are most heavily relying on Meteor are too busy to contribute. Think about all that’s involved in making a contribution, especially one as involved as optimizing the build process. Like any other onboarding process, code familiarization takes hours upon hours, and I imagine many of us don’t have that kind of time.

I’ll keep my hopes up, but I’ve heard mentions of that starting at version 1.1 :slight_smile:

That’s a very good news, I am very excited. This is by far the most important short term fix and MDG should stop all other work and all those smart people should get in a room, setup some big project as an example, and optimize the sh… out of those build times. This is long overdue. Surprisingly long.

I just updated to 1.4.1 and I must say, the reload times have dramatically improved. Around 5 seconds after a small change in 1 jsx file. This is a factor 5 faster as it was before easily.

We’re getting there! Woot!

@Ben: same for me after

meteor update --all-packages

1.4.1 seems to show already some improvement before 1.4.2 …
will try on a bigger project.

Nice, thanks for the heads up! Updating to 1.4.1 now.

But didn’t @ffxsam just quote MDG:

we need…community members who are willing to help diagnose and fix the problem

Notice what they did not say. He did not say they have, are, or will be working on the issue. Instead they said we need community members to help fix the problem…

There are multiple issues addressing more specific parts of this problem already (e.g. #7493). We don’t need another one.

Over at MDG I think it’s all hands on deck with Apollo right now (1.5). I’m not sure if they have anyone working on Meteor classic. Post 1.5 release, I wonder how much love Meteor classic will get…

Even so, let’s try to stay positive and hope that whomever is working on the 1.4 branch will eventually solve it once and for all. :slight_smile:

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I think they need community help on various different setups and that “don’t need another one” bit was about github ticket. I think it’s pretty official that MDG is working on build time problem and some people report improvements on 1.4.1 already so lets be positive :slight_smile:

Good news @aadams - MDG just clarified this in the 1.4.2 release PR (7668). Quoting the relevant bits:

To be clear, we are not expecting the community to do all (or even very much) of this work. Without a doubt, the core team will be working on these problems harder than anyone. If you’re up for a challenge, though, we’re here to support your efforts.

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There are two issues on 1.4.0.1

  1. You have to install manually meteor-tools in your project and outside your project
    ex. meteor update meteor-tools

  2. If you use -p (port) you must specify
    Ex. meteor run -p 5000

Otherwise it try to download package and install every time you launch your meteor