hugo serve uses 3 GB when serving archive

[mpsijm]

hugo serve uses 3 GB since we added the archive (#15), which I think is somewhat undesirable 😛 It also takes a bit longer to start.
We should figure out if there is a way for hugo to serve static files without having it keep them in memory all the time.

There is the --renderStaticToDisk flag (see options), which copies the entire /static folder (including the archive) to /public before serving. Still somewhat undesirable, but already better than keeping everything in memory, I guess?

Apparently, someone had the same question in 2019, but they never got an answer.

[mpsijm]

Possibly, a symlink from /static to /public could work, in combination with the --renderStaticToDisk flag: gohugoio/hugo#7591 (comment)

[mpsijm]

A similar Q&A got as answer "yeah, just don't serve them from Hugo, but store them externally". So, one other solution could be to not serve the archive via Hugo, but have a python3 -m http.server (or something similar) for the /archive subroutes (or possibly even for all static files). @verwoerd @robertdijk what do you think of that idea?

[robertdijk]

Hugo serve is only used locally when working on the site, but when we deploy it, we will just just Hugo to build it, and use nginx to serve it. So it’s not really a problem outside of the development.

[mpsijm]

Cool, good to know! Then running hugo serve --renderStaticToDisk in combination with symlinking /static to /public will work for me. I'll add it to the README 🙂