Given that Markdown is a very popular document format for blogging, this gives us the opportunity to compare the performance of different site generat

Which Generator builds Markdown the fastest?

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2024-09-14 13:00:17

Given that Markdown is a very popular document format for blogging, this gives us the opportunity to compare the performance of different site generators for this pervasive use case (highlighted on each generator’s documentation, as noted above).

Let’s see how each generator stacks up when consuming markdown files from the local project’s file system and building into a production-ready project.

Each run was repeated 3 times and the lowest/fastest time was selected. This result set was generated on a MacBook Air (M1, 2020), macOS Monterey 12.5, 16 GB memory.

For each generator sample I attempted to create a reduced project with the sole use case of processing markdown files. I opt-ed out of TypeScript when options were presented in various cli tools to do so. Output folders and framework specific cache folders were deleted before each run.

I put out a Twitter poll to gauge how folks felt about project sizes. 1000 files was considered a Large project by 58.8% of voters, Medium for 36.8% of voters. Markdown samples borrowed from Sean C Davis’s SSG Build Performance Comparison repository. I have not yet added tests for Jekyll or Nuxt but I’m open to it!