question - incremental builds support = part II

[ekdev2]

#4981
I think @LekoArts is right. What I mean is if you generate a site with 2000 pages and deploy to aws, then one of those content pages changes in the cms, can you generate just that one page and deploy it.

[m-allanson]

It's not something Gatsby does at the moment, but it is something people have asked for. There's been work in version 2 to improve performance on larger sites, but there's no release date for that yet.

[mattferderer]

@m-allanson is there a discussion/issue on how to handle this? I didn't see it in the link you listed. I'm curious to hear conversations on how to handle doing this on a host like Netlify & using a CMS like Wordpress/Drupal that currently require a lot of HTTP requests during build.

[pieh]

AFAIK you wouldn't been able to use incremental builds on netlify because .cache and public directories are not preserved between builds, so it will always do clean build

[mattferderer]

That's good to know. I'm tossing around a ton of ideas that aren't well thought out. So even if we could eliminate the need for HTTP requests, we still need to make sure the .cache and public directories can be referenced by the build tool which eliminates many of the hosts that lower the bar to entry.

[robertschneiderman]

Another use case for incremental building is when you have a very large site that you want to build in parts. I was getting "heap out of memory error" when building ~5k pages at once.

We plan on our site getting very large, so we're testing Gatsby at larger scales. We've tried doing something like this path: './src/pages/${subPath}', where subPath is process.argv[3]. This works nicely when we host parts of our site with gatsby develop. It also circumvents the problems with the memory heap when using gatsby build for a 5k+ page site. For it to really be a solution, it would probably depend on the ability to specify an output subdirectory within the public folder: #4756

[ekdev2]

what if another approach is used to achieve the same goal. I wanted to run an idea by you guys and see what people think. So lets say you have a 5k page web site. The initial pages would be generated statically but each page will have a sub component that will load on top of the static content with the same content thats read from static json files. This way if a user wanted to update one page in the CMS in the middle of the day, they can make the update and just that static json file would be regenerated and deployed to a CDN. Then you can just regenerate the whole site maybe once a day as a nightly process. The seo static content might not be the most up to date during the day but I dont see that as a big deal. It will just get updated during the nightly process.

[tsimons]

@robertschneiderman we've run in to the memory issue as well. We're closer to 1500 pages, but an insane amount of images (design blog). We've turned off source maps, and stopped the build from downloading image files, but ultimately had to edit the build command to increase the memory allocated to the node instance. via the --max_old_space_size flag.

One thing that worries me about this feature is schema building. If we don't have every post available for gatsby to build a schema from, our queries will throw errors. It would be really nice if there was a way to pass schemas to gatsby, or at least provide dummy entities during the build to demonstrate the different shapes they may take.

[agonsalves]

I am considering using Gatsby to build the UI for a content site with over 5000 items, most with interconnected relationships to each other. The data will come from a database-driven CMS.

The benefit to using Gatsby over a standard API-driven React site is that I would spend a fraction of the time building and maintaining the data API and state management system that loads the remote data and stores it. (Since I plan on deploying this application for multiple sites of similar size, this seems like a very valuable benefit.)

The downside to using Gatsby in this case would be the fact that the entire site would need to be rebuilt for even the most insignificant content update. Forgot to add a comma? Rebuild all 5000 pages! Who even knows how long that would take? This is even more of an issue when considering the experience of the CMS users - they're used to seeing changes appear on the site immediately after they save them. With Gatsby, we're looking at a few minutes' wait (at least) before the change appears.

If there were a way to trigger builds for a subset of pages, it would make Gatsby the clear, definitive choice. At this moment, though, it's a tough sell.

[KyleAMathews]

BTW, I've been working a lot on improving speeds for larger site builds for v2. On the latest v2 beta — you might be able to build 5000 pages in < 1:30. There'll be more speed improvements coming.

[tsimons]

That's amazing @KyleAMathews! I definitely look forward to that! Let me know if you want to test against an image heavy blog