Rendering is very slow (~2 seconds per page) and crashes with > ~80 pages

[simonwiles]

Hi -- I'm having some problems with an 11ty codebase. Builds are painfully slow (~2 seconds per page), and I can't even build the (relatively small) site completely at all. The site is very simple. I would be very grateful for any pointers or suggestions to help work out what's going on and what I might do about it.

Below is a benchmark with a subset of my pages. Attempting to build with all of the pages (~220) uses all my available RAM, starts thrashing swap, and then crashes with

FATAL ERROR: Reached heap limit Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory

Edit: I can build the entire site -- [11ty] Copied 2 files / Wrote 256 files in 698.56 seconds (2728.8ms each, v2.0.1) -- by passing --max_old_space_size=16384 to the node process (--max_old_space_size=8192 isn't enough), but 11.5 minutes and ~13GiB of memory consumed seems a lot for ~250 mostly simple .md pages; the dev. experience is really painful, and it will presumably present problems for CI/CD when I get to that bit.

This is on a 6-core i1-10750H CPU, with 16GiB of RAM and 16GiB of swap. The codebase is at https://github.com/simonwiles/ach.org/ -- it's a work-in-progress port from a site that was developed in Gatsby.

% DEBUG=Eleventy:Benchmark* npx @11ty/eleventy
(node:4779) [DEP0040] DeprecationWarning: The `punycode` module is deprecated. Please use a userland alternative instead.
(Use `node --trace-deprecation ...` to show where the warning was created)
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark     67ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) Searching the file system (templates) +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      6ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) Searching the file system (data) +5ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark    979ms   1%    69× (Aggregate) Template Read +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      0ms   0%    77× (Aggregate) (count) getOutputLocations +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%    80× (Aggregate) Template Compile +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark    536ms   0%    77× (Aggregate) Render +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark    157ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/index.11ty.js +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark    180ms   0%     2× (Aggregate) Passthrough Copy File +1ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark    171ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/about/officers/index.11ty.js +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      0ms   0%    69× (Aggregate) (count) Template Compile Cache Miss +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark     28ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/04/ach-2020-elections-results/index.md +1ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      5ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/04/the-ach-co-vice-president-experiment/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark     11ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/03/2021-ach-conference-in-houston-tx/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      4ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/06/dh-qa-whats-new/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/09/a-guide-towards-anti-racist-technical-terminology/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/08/rfp-racial-justice-consultant/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/10/call-for-nominations-ach-executive-council/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      4ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/03/ach-2020-elections-candidate-statements/index.md +1ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/06/ach-statement-on-black-lives-matter-structural-racism-and-our-organization/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2021/09/fall-2021-programming-historian-book-club/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark     11ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/09/toward-anti-racist-technical-terminology/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      5ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/08/new-ach-liaison-volunteers/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2021/12/ach-advocacy-leads-to-new-opportunities-for-text-and-video-analysis/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      4ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2021/02/portraits-in-dh-marisa-parham-and-aadhum/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark     11ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/12/appel-a-propositions/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/10/cfp-ach-mentorship-working-group/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      5ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/12/convocatoria-association-for-computers-and-the-humanities-2021/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      3ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/12/call-for-proposals-association-for-computers-and-the-humanities-2021/index.md +1ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      3ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2020/10/introducing-portraits-in-dh/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2021/04/portraits-in-dh-dr-sylvia-fernandez/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2022/01/portraits-in-dh-disco-network/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2021/12/ach-mla-teaching-with-data-feminism/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2021/12/call-for-nominations-ach-executive-council/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      5ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2022/02/ach-2022-elections-slate/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      4ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/2023/02/ach-2023-elections-slate/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      6ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/about/alumni/index.md +1ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      8ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/about/constitution/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      2ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/activities/grants-and-awards/occasional-funding-sponsorship/index.md +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      0ms   0%     6× (Aggregate) > Compile > ./pages/news/index.11ty.js +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark     35ms   0%     6× (Aggregate) > Render > ./pages/news/index.11ty.js (6 pages) +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark     12ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render to > _site/news/index.html +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      5ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render to > _site/news/1/index.html +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      5ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render to > _site/news/2/index.html +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      5ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render to > _site/news/3/index.html +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      5ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render to > _site/news/4/index.html +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark      3ms   0%     1× (Aggregate) > Render to > _site/news/5/index.html +0ms
  Eleventy:Benchmark Benchmark 165122ms  99%    77× (Aggregate) Template Write +0ms
[11ty] Copied 2 files / Wrote 77 files in 167.02 seconds (2169.1ms each, v2.0.1)
                                                                                                                                                                             15:10:29 [3m-9.0s]