Optimizing Large-Scale Gatsby Builds Through Selective Rendering

Meshery
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1

The Development Bottleneck

When working on complex documentation sites, developers often hit a critical pain point: local development becomes impractical due to memory constraints. During recent work on a Gatsby-based project, I encountered this exact challenge when standard builds began failing on machines with 16GB RAM.

The core issue manifested in two key areas:

  1. Complete build failures during content updates

  2. Unresponsive systems during image processing stages

Strategic Code Modification

Core Implementation

The solution focused on surgical modifications to Gatsby’s page creation logic rather than complete architectural changes. Here’s the key modification flow:

If you want to see a practical example, you can check this: GitHub - zihanKuang/layer5 at partially-rendered

Original Code Structure

The initial implementation generated all pages unconditionally:


// Original page creation (commented out)

exports.createPages = async ({ actions, graphql, reporter }) => {

// ... full page generation logic for all content types

};

Modified Approach

The updated implementation focuses on essential paths:


// Simplified page creation with selective rendering

exports.createPages = async ({ actions }) => {

const { createRedirect } = actions;

// Critical redirects remain

createRedirect({ fromPath: "/newcomer", toPath: "/newcomers" });

// Modified page creation commented out for local development

};

Key Changes

  1. Selective Page Generation

Through code commenting rather than conditional checks, we achieve faster rebuild cycles

  1. CI-Specific Handling

Maintained production integrity through:


if (process.env.CI === "true") {

// Production-specific path handling

exports.onCreatePage = ({ page, actions }) => {

// HTML extension handling for GitHub Pages

};

}

Practical Implementation

Step 1: Identify Core Paths

Step 2: Surgical Code Modifications

The critical change came from:


-// exports.createPages = async ({ actions, graphql, reporter }) => {

+exports.createPages = async ({ actions }) => {

// Only maintain essential redirects

- // ... full page generation logic

+ createRedirect({ fromPath: "/newcomer", toPath: "/newcomers" });

};
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