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Turbopack Performance Benchmarks

by palmdeezy on 11/1/22, 12:28 AM with 47 comments

• by colinchartier on 11/1/22, 2:17 AM

  Another benchmark by maintainer of Vue and Vite, Evan You: https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr

  He seems to imply that Turbopack is very close in performance to existing tooling like Vite in his benchmark, and not 10x better in common cases

  Edit: his thoughts as of this hour: https://github.com/yyx990803/vite-vs-next-turbo-hmr/discussi...

• by Bilal_io on 11/1/22, 1:11 AM

  I am very excited for Turbopack.

  I hope to see this considered by the Angular team. Angular is tightly coupled with webpack, however, they've been experimenting with ESBuild, which is included in Angular 14. Vite has been tested by an Angular team member and reported some promising results. I just hope they don't tightly couple the implementation with ESBuild and fall into the same issue again.

  Back to Turbopack:

  > Turbopack is up to 10x and 700x faster than existing approaches.

  The 700x speed gain compared to webpack is for dev mode changing 30000 files at once.. I understand that it scales very well. But is it realistic to boast about unrealistic scenarios? It erks me.

• by QuadrupleA on 11/1/22, 2:32 AM

  As a dev who avoids build steps entirely in web stacks, hearing that 1.1 sec startup is excellent, or 10-700x faster than the norm seems strange - I've gotten so used to stuff being instant.

  If you haven't tried coding a little closer to the "metal" (vanilla js/css/html) I definitely recommend it. Browsers give you a lot out of the box now, and life without builds is sweet - fast iteration time, perfect in-browser dev tool support, and vastly reduced codebase complexity.

• by jamescostian on 11/1/22, 1:42 AM

  Here's the bulk of the code used to generate the code they're building: https://github.com/vercel/turbo/blob/main/crates/turbopack-c...

  They're building basically the same thing over and over again. This surprised me, given their intro post: https://vercel.com/blog/turbopack

  Relevant quote:

  > Turbopack is built on Turbo: an open-source, incremental memoization framework for Rust. Turbo can cache the result of any function in the program. When the program is run again, functions won't re-run unless their inputs have changed. This granular architecture enables your program to skip large amounts of work, at the level of the function.

  I'd be curious to see if a real-world app (or even one generated with more variety in components) showed comparable performance numbers

• by quaunaut on 11/1/22, 3:03 AM

  Something that isn't clear to me: Why, exactly, is it so much faster than even its own build tool(swc)?

  In other words, what's speeding up here isn't build speed, but the ability to download the updated changes. Right? Or am I wrong?

• by liuliu on 11/1/22, 1:25 AM

  > Turbopack and Next.js 13.0.1 are out addressing a regression that snuck in prior to public release and after the initial benchmarks were taken. We also fixed an incorrect rounding bug on our website (0.01s → 15ms). We appreciate Evan You's work that helped us identify and correct this.

  Does this mean they don't have a CI to run benchmarks to gate regressions?

• by Touche on 11/1/22, 1:47 AM

  Weird that rebuild is absent in these benchmarks.

• by encryptluks2 on 11/1/22, 1:20 AM

  Has this even been released? I went to look for a release on the repo and website and only saw instructions for using it with Next js. Might as well call it Next.js if it can't easily be used with anything else. The only way I found to build it was from the master branch. The latest tip in master is not a release.

• by newbieuser on 11/1/22, 6:18 AM

  it doesn't make much sense to compare a tool that only works with nextjs with webpack and vite

• by pyrolistical on 11/1/22, 1:06 AM

  Good on them make a correction

• by 8n4vidtmkvmk on 11/1/22, 4:46 AM

  will this work with existing webpack configs? and with babel? i need babel..