I do that - and even if I disabled just about everything in my server folder, it somehow still rebuilds the entire server app no matter what I edit in the /imports directory.
I should also note - rebuild times are between 5-10 seconds on my machine in a VM (Ubuntu or MacOS) which isn’t too bad given the size of my app, but is intolerably slow (100 seconds or longer) on Windows on the same machine. Its so slow, I call it broken on Windows. I’m hoping to find some time eventually to look into it more closely (aside from general slowness, often 10-20 seconds for it to notice a file has changed, then 40+ seconds to do a modern rebuild, it also suffers from a bug which seems to cause the dev-server to silently stall while the build server builds the legacy bundle as well - another 40 seconds).
My reload time for a large react component on modern mac pro is around 3 to 6s for client refresh and 6 to 10s for server refresh. And server refresh will not be triggered if client code is placed in client folder. I wish I didn’t have to place files in client folder and we had HMR for react, nice to have.
It’s definitely faster to have things in the client folder, but my app uses SSR extensively (and other assets like Schemas must be accessed in client and server), so I can’t do that. It’d be great if there was some way to make Meteor build a graph of which files are linked in the server, and simply avoid rebuilding the server when files which aren’t linked (if I disable SSR) are changed - or maybe to provide some other kind of solution, like making the client files available to the server inside the onPageLoad handler. It’s not intolerably slow on *NIX platforms, but faster performance is always welcome.