I continue to work on my site over break. Today I got the build time down to 3.5 seconds for the Hugo build and just under 3 seconds for post-processing and syntax-checking (mostly using xmllint). I’m not parallelizing the post-processing since my laptop just has two cores (no simultaneous multithreading) and CI has one.
Seven seconds is still too slow for changes to feel instant, though. I can’t just rebuild on save. It’s especially slow for a site with only <200 pages.
Hugo’s profiler tells me that a lot of the time is spent searching for Webmentions that match the current page. Perhaps I should do that server-side ahead of time; right now, I download all my Webmentions as one big fat JSON file and load it into memory once. I should also move some post-processing back into Hugo.
I also re-used xmllint to minify my feeds and check their syntax. The minification worked particularly well since my feeds contain raw, un-escaped XHTML. Some clients still fetch my full-text feeds without transparent compression.