Long build time

[yakkomajuri]

Our Netlify builds are failing for getting over their 15min limit. They seem to be quite proactive in upgrading people to 30min limits upon request, so I've made a request for it.

A never-ending struggle with serverless tools...

Also wondering if we should do something to lower that build time?

EDIT: The underlying problem is a long build time due to image thumbnail generation. Netlify limit has been fixed.

[yakkomajuri]

Update: I installed a plugin for Gatsby build caching with Netlify

[yakkomajuri]

Also added incremental building

[Tbhesswebber]

I just accidentally did a whole bunch of research to try to figure out why my last PR failed in CICD. Here are the logs: https://app.netlify.com/sites/posthog/deploys/5ffdb606c8a61d0007af8a30

The relevant line is almost at the very bottom:

10:02:33 AM: success Generating image thumbnails - 949.151s - 1295/1295 1.36/s

In my digging, it looks like the best options are to turn-off processing in the pipeline, pre-process and cache the images separately from the build, or to use a different system as your image CMS. There is also a parallel-runner for Gatsby and Netlify.

This github issue has a lot of discussion on the topic and this one has some context around the image resizing piece of things, although it only extends to static images and not gifs.

I don't know if any of those are helpful, but I just thought I would share since I already went down that rabbit hole!

[mariusandra]

I have some pretty good experience using imgix for a previous project. They seem to have a gatsby plugin that promises to "speed up your build times significantly.".

[Tbhesswebber]

I don't know how relevant this is, but this is another thing that I stumbled across earlier that recommends against the usage of imgix.

gatsbyjs/gatsby#25827 (comment)

Warning about imgix, Unsplash apparently uses them and refers to their API for image transformations. When I used that (via Unsplash) I noticed images would sometimes lose tone mapping(or looked like that), in that the warm tones were swapped for cold ones, I guess there either was a bug or setup issue that stripped away some information of the image.. I did not encounter that when I rewrote the transformations via a small sharp js script to pre-process locally.

[mariusandra]

Interesting re changing tones. Though from that I read that if it's good enough for unsplashed, it'll probably be good enough for us as well.

I never noticed any color changing myself, though perhaps I just didn't know to look for it. In any case, I was really happy to never have to worry about generating thumbnails after switching to imgix. Their pricing made more sense than the competition (cloudinary?) as well.

[yakkomajuri]

So the original issue has been fixed now as we've gotten bumped to 30min builds. However, the underlying issue of a long build time due to image thumbnails still persists.

[yakkomajuri]

What has been done towards this:

• Netlify increased our limit to 30min
• Gatsby cache plugin added to Netlify
• Add incremental building #840
• Remove resizing images #848
• Imgix plugin #849

We should be good now.