*Very* slow webpack dev server start - where to look ?

[bogdan-calapod]

Hello there!

I'm having a pretty large React + TypeScript app that I'm working with, and I'm having quite a big problem regarding the development build time. When running yarn start, it sometimes takes upwards of 20 minutes to start the development server.

Unfortunately Google isn't much help, as it seems that everyone is talking about production performance. I've tried using the speed-measure-webpack-plugin shoehorned into my node_modules but it seems that it doesn't output anything.

I've added code splitting to most of my components in the hopes that it would improve somehow the development server's start time, but no luck.

The problem that I'm facing is that I can't find any good resources on how to debug or to find out what exactly is causing my build to be so slow, as I'm sure that it is something on my end. Where should I look for info on this ?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Some of my environment info down below:

OS: Windows 10 20H1 with WSL2 (Ubuntu 20.04) - files in the /home/ directory, but I've also noticed on an Ubuntu 20.10 (non-WSL) installation
Project: Create React App 4.0.3 + TypeScript + SASS
Node version: 12.18.3

[ghost]

You might want to create a temporary repository so that others could take a look.

[bogdan-calapod]

Unfortunately the app is private so I can't share :( The repo is also around ~300MB (frontend + backend) so it would be hard to share.

I was thinking of looking up any general pain points or smells that would apply to most projects, but Google didn't help much.