Yesterday, I imported a site with 445 HTML files into a new minima-themed site. I excluded most of the pages from header inclusion. It takes 40 minutes to build the site. This is crazy.

It turns out that the header page links are generated in the minima theme with an exponential algorithm, which is fine if you have mostly blog and a few pages, but terrible if you have lots of pages. The workaround was to replace the contents of the <div class="trigger"> block with a hardcoded set of links <a class="page-link" href="/path/to/foo.html">Foo</a> for the pages I did want to link to, which brought me back to a few seconds to generate the site; the whole pipeline for github pages for it is back to about 1 minute end-to-end after I git push.

So no, jekyll isn’t really that slow, but its approach to templating makes it easy for its themes to introduce slowness.

Time to learn hugo. As long as I can preserve permalinks, I don’t care about the exact look and feel; Hugo Flex looks pretty good and is a no-javascript theme.

I’m curious to see how well hugo import jekyll works!