make install takes 9 minutes

[debugwand]

make install takes 9 minutes
the athloi task seems to be the slowest part

[i-like-robots]

I think this is due to a combination of a few things:

• npm is slow, running many npm installs is very slow
• Sophos installed on FT laptops can compete for CPU whilst running npm install
• .vscode and/or Spotlight can also get keen indexing node_modules whilst installing (you can configure both to not include node_modules in indexes)
• Gatsby is huge
• We build the docs site (Gatsby) on postinstall which we should probably not do. This is probably single the most expensive single task.

If you'd like to try the install step or other commands without Athloi to see if it makes any difference to your setup here are a few scripts to help:

Tasks in series:

#!/bin/bash
start=$(date +%s)

find ./{components,packages,tools} -name '*' -depth 1 -exec bash -c "cd '{}' && npm i" \;

end=$(date +%s)

echo "duration: $((end-start)) seconds."

And in parallel:

#!/bin/bash
start=$(date +%s)

find ./{components,packages,tools} -name '*' -depth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 -L 1 -P 10 bash -c 'cd "$0" && npm i'

end=$(date +%s)

echo "duration: $((end-start)) seconds."

(Using Athloi or vanilla bash shouldn't make any difference to speed but it's worth trying just in case)

[i-like-robots]

There are two major improvements we could make that I am currently aware of:

• Refactor the docs site not to use Gatsby (it is by far the largest dependency, and as mentioned above - takes a relatively long time to build)
• Use Yarn instead of npm to avoid the repeated work of running multiple install tasks (we did try Yarn early on but Gatsby and Storybook didn't agree on anything. It also has a different syntax for symlinks which would need to be resolved.)

[i-like-robots]

And to reiterate how how hard npm can have to fight for CPU, below are screenshots taken from activity monitor whilst running the install task. There are a few things here that might be worth investigating.

Anecdotally... my laptop at home - which is not as powerful as my work machine - takes < half the time to install and run x-dash.

Whatever the cause - this is something we need to improve.

[i-like-robots]

make install on my home machine minus x-docs takes 63 seconds... so I think I know what to do!