As mentioned a couple of days ago, I've been toying with finding areas of improvement in respect to the performance of BlogMore. Until now, for good reasons, I've not really paid any attention to how fast (or slow) BlogMore is when it comes to generating my blog. While it's never been blindingly fast, it's always been fast enough and I was more keen on making it work right. So for a good while the focus has been on well-formed output, stuff that keeps the crawlers happy, that sort of thing.

But now that I'm in a place where new features aren't really so necessary, it does feel like a good point to find any easy wins in speeding up the code. I think it's gone well.

BlogMore v2.22.0 contains quite a few internal changes that speed up some core parts of site generation. Many of the things identified by Gemini, back when I first kicked this process off, have been done. The amount of Markdown->HTML conversion work has been vastly reduced, which has had a pretty big impact on all sorts of things. There's also caching of the FontAwesome metadata1 which should save a fair bit of time on slower connections. I did avoid the whole business of parallel processing as I dabbled with this near the start of the project and I could not wrangle a win out of that at all; given how much of a win I've had with these changes, I doubt that would change (it could conceivably make things worse).

So, how much faster is it? Roughly, based on my tests, a site generates in about 1/4 of the time it did before. On my M2 Mac Mini my blog builds in under 3 seconds; with v2.21.0 it took around 13 seconds. In my case that's with all the optional features of BlogMore turned on.

Naturally this work has touched on a lot of internals of the code, and made significant changes to the generation pipelines of lots of different pages and features. I've done my absolute best to compare2 the output of v2.21.0 and v2.22.0 and I can't see any significant differences3. When trying out v2.22.0 I would suggest paying just a little extra attention to the result, to be sure you're happy that nothing has changed.

  1. It lives in ~/.cache/blogmore on Unix and Unix-like systems, or %LOCALAPPDATA%\blogmore\cache on DOS/VMS-influenced systems. ↩

  2. Lots of diff -rq and then diffing an assorted sample of files that showed differences to inspect what was actually different. ↩

  3. Actually, there's a small difference in the context shown in backlinks, but this was a deliberate change and a very small cosmetic enhancement. ↩