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I have used Jekyll for years on a GitHub pages site. I like working with Jekyll overall, but the site has grown to a moderate size and now it takes about 8 seco

by japhyr 6y ago

I have used Jekyll for years on a GitHub pages site. I like working with Jekyll overall, but the site has grown to a moderate size and now it takes about 8 seconds to render changes locally. When I started a new personal site last year I went with Hugo because one of its main selling points is speed. Can anyone share how Pelican's rendering speed compares to Jekyll and Hugo?

tuananh 6y ago
based on the language alone, hugo is probably winner here.
spapas82 6y ago
Haven't used the others but pelican is rather slow. For be blog, it takes a couple of minutes to generate the site and around 10 seconds to render any changes. That's my main complaint of pelican.
philshem 6y ago
I migrated from Pelican to Hugo. Build/render times are a fraction with Hugo. But my main issue with Pelican was git submodules for plugins. With Hugo I just find a theme I like and then everything works. For the record, I use Python daily and I’ve never written a line in Go. But with these static site generators, most people won’t ever need to look under the hood. Edit: I see the main feature for Pelican 4.5 is namespace plugins, which should prevent some headaches.
seanwilson 6y ago
I tested Hugo a few days ago on 10K posts and it took 40 seconds for a full build. It builds in a fraction of second if you've only got a few pages. I don't love the template language but aside from basic template features like if/then/else/not/forEach I don't really find I need to do much fancy when jumping between different static site generators or even WordPress. Hugo's speed wins out for me a lot of the time.
BeetleB 6y ago
Pelican is slow. If 8 seconds bothers you, you won't be happy with Pelican. I think there are settings where it kind of detects what has changed and only renders that output to speed it up, but I've not experimented with it. I rarely make changes to my site, so waiting is not a concern for me.
armonraphiel 6y ago
Nothing comes close to Hugo in speed. However, before migrating I suggest: - using Jekyll's --incremental flag - move your asset pipeline into a separate process (webpack --watch) - reduce any Jekyll gems (each one adds considerable overhead) If you want to leave Jekyll, I also recommend Eleventy. It's fast, require very little work to migrate from Jekyll, and can create pages from data.
nickjj 6y ago
> but the site has grown to a moderate size and now it takes about 8 seconds to render changes locally Have you tried the --incremental flag after your initial creation of the page? My site has 300 blog posts, over 150 drafts and dozens of other pages but when I'm actively writing a post there's about a 1 second delay between saving the file and seeing it reload in the browser with live reload using --incremental and about 20 seconds without it.
- japhyr 6y ago
  Thank you, and to others as well who have mentioned --incremental! I can't believe I never thought to look at the documentation for `jekyll serve`. This will make my life much easier. Another note on using Hugo. I have really enjoyed working with Hugo, both for the speed and for the overall experience. I ran into an issue where the table of contents was not rendering properly. I believe it's a known bug, perhaps just with some themes. Since I'm not familiar with Go yet, I came up with a quick fix by writing a quick Python script that converts all the incorrect TOC links to the correct links for my site. It's plenty fast for me, and I can always make it faster by using bash or sed, or learning a little Go and patching Hugo. At some point I'd like to do that just to contribute back to the project. So it's quite possible to use a static site generator in a language you're less familiar with, and create quick tooling scripts around it for any issues you run into that you don't want to deal with in the generator's native language.

by japhyr 6y ago

tuananh 6y ago

based on the language alone, hugo is probably winner here.

spapas82 6y ago

Haven't used the others but pelican is rather slow. For be blog, it takes a couple of minutes to generate the site and around 10 seconds to render any changes. That's my main complaint of pelican.

philshem 6y ago

I migrated from Pelican to Hugo. Build/render times are a fraction with Hugo. But my main issue with Pelican was git submodules for plugins. With Hugo I just find a theme I like and then everything works. For the record, I use Python daily and I’ve never written a line in Go. But with these static site generators, most people won’t ever need to look under the hood. Edit: I see the main feature for Pelican 4.5 is namespace plugins, which should prevent some headaches.

seanwilson 6y ago

I tested Hugo a few days ago on 10K posts and it took 40 seconds for a full build. It builds in a fraction of second if you've only got a few pages. I don't love the template language but aside from basic template features like if/then/else/not/forEach I don't really find I need to do much fancy when jumping between different static site generators or even WordPress. Hugo's speed wins out for me a lot of the time.

BeetleB 6y ago

Pelican is slow. If 8 seconds bothers you, you won't be happy with Pelican. I think there are settings where it kind of detects what has changed and only renders that output to speed it up, but I've not experimented with it. I rarely make changes to my site, so waiting is not a concern for me.

armonraphiel 6y ago

Nothing comes close to Hugo in speed. However, before migrating I suggest: - using Jekyll's --incremental flag - move your asset pipeline into a separate process (webpack --watch) - reduce any Jekyll gems (each one adds considerable overhead) If you want to leave Jekyll, I also recommend Eleventy. It's fast, require very little work to migrate from Jekyll, and can create pages from data.

nickjj 6y ago

> but the site has grown to a moderate size and now it takes about 8 seconds to render changes locally Have you tried the --incremental flag after your initial creation of the page? My site has 300 blog posts, over 150 drafts and dozens of other pages but when I'm actively writing a post there's about a 1 second delay between saving the file and seeing it reload in the browser with live reload using --incremental and about 20 seconds without it.

japhyr 6y ago
Thank you, and to others as well who have mentioned --incremental! I can't believe I never thought to look at the documentation for `jekyll serve`. This will make my life much easier. Another note on using Hugo. I have really enjoyed working with Hugo, both for the speed and for the overall experience. I ran into an issue where the table of contents was not rendering properly. I believe it's a known bug, perhaps just with some themes. Since I'm not familiar with Go yet, I came up with a quick fix by writing a quick Python script that converts all the incorrect TOC links to the correct links for my site. It's plenty fast for me, and I can always make it faster by using bash or sed, or learning a little Go and patching Hugo. At some point I'd like to do that just to contribute back to the project. So it's quite possible to use a static site generator in a language you're less familiar with, and create quick tooling scripts around it for any issues you run into that you don't want to deal with in the generator's native language.