How to speed up Jekyll/Octopress generation?

Question

I'm using Octopress as my blog engine. It's perfect. But if there are many posts, for example 400+ posts, the speed of generation is soooo slow.

So, is there any way to speed up Jekyll/Octopress generation?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Obviously if you are just working on one post, there is no need to wait for the entire site to generate. What you are looking for is the rake isolate[partial_post_name] task.
Using rake isolate, you can “isolate” only that post you are working on and move all the others to the source/_stash folder. The partial_post_name parameter is just some words in the file name for the post. For example, if I want to isolate the post from the earlier example, I would use

rake isolate[plain-english]  

This will move all the other posts to source/_stash and only keep the 2011-09-29-just-type-the-title-of-the-post-here-in-plain-english.markdown post in source/_posts. You can also do this while you are running rake preview. It will just detect a massive change and only regenerate that one post from then on.

by @Pavan Podila
More Info: Tips for Speeding Up Octopress Site Generation

2013.01.08 update:
Hexo--A fast, simple & powerful blog framework, powered by Node.js.
Features:Incredibly fast - generate static files in a glance

2013.6.20 update:
gor -- A static websites and blog generator engine written in Go
gor has following awesome benefits: 1. Speed -- Less than 1 second when compiling all my near 200 blogs on wendal.net 2. Simple -- Only one single executable file generated after compiling, no other dependence

Answer 2

Install Ruby GSL

gem install gsl 

You should notice a speed increase.

Answer 3

hexo powered by Node.js. I am using it, much faster than Octopress. And it provides a simple way to migrate your articles to hexo very easily.

Answer 4

You can generate only one post while you are writing it using

rake isolate[your-post]

and then

rake integrate

to go back to normal.

To fully answer your question, you can't generate only one post. You can see Octopress' Issue #395 on that subject, which explains that this is due to a limitation on Jekyll's side.

Answer 5

Reached this post with the same problem, but then did not quite like the idea of rake isolate. Also the inbuilt task does not integrate with the _drafts workflow. So what I ended up using is to create a custom config.yml with the _posts folder excluded (using exclude) and have only the drafts folder built. You can pass in a different config file as command line parameter to jekyll. I just used this when actively writing new posts and while publish use the same old approach (which still does take some time). This approach builds only the draft post and I am good with that.

jekyll build --watch --drafts --config _previewconfig.yml

For those interested in the complete worklow take a look here