Need for Speed

This site’s dependency on pandoc lasted about a month.

The builds on Netlify were measured in minutes. The majority of this time was spent installing pandoc via the Brewfile.netlify file. This expensive install doesn’t appear to be cache’able so it’s paid every deploy.

I had aspirations of this site carrying minimal dependencies. An ideal of not even having a Gemfile. But it turns out that I have to have a Gemfile on Netlify. Even a core utility like rake was unavailable without it making an appearance in the Gemfile.

So since I’m installing gems anyway—why not investigate alternatives to rendering markdown.

I created three renderers.

Ruby with one external dependency (pandoc)
Ruby standard library with zero dependencies (RDoc::Markdown)
Ruby with gem dependencies (kramdown)

I benchmarked my three renderers before making a decision. The results were surprising.

pandoc
  0.029805   0.160651   2.808135 (  3.647894)
rdoc
  4.540228   0.046484   4.677953 (  4.722740)
kramdown
  0.126872   0.029985   0.269132 (  0.330185)

pandoc is a library written in Rust. I assumed it would be much faster than everything. It was noticeably faster than rdoc. It was an order-of-magnitude slower than kramdown.

So now I have a few external dependencies on Ruby gems.

kramdown for rendering markdown
kramdown-parser-gfm for parsing the GitHub Flavored Markdown dialect
rouge for syntax highlighting in code examples

Three external dependencies were added. Dependence on external binaries went to zero. Local build times dropped by an order of magnitude. The first deploy with a new Gemfile was a total of 23 seconds on Netlify.

Hooray for Ruby!

Update: the second deploy after this change (where gems were cached) had a build time of 12s, and a total deploy time of 16s. 📉

Published: 2022-08-10

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