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Anthony Gushu
Anthony Gushu

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Is Gridsome scalable?

I've been testing the waters with Gridsome for some smaller statically-generated eCommerce & blog projects with great success. There, the amount of content, frequency of publishing, and desired timeliness of content going live aren't too intense. So in those projects, build times aren't an issue.

Though something I've been toying with is the idea of bringing my day job's news publishing platform (which uses good ol' WordPress, jQuery, and PHP) into a more modern Vue-centric frontend stack that's either SSR'd or statically generated. I'm interested in what a headless Gridsome frontend might look like at scale for our publishing platform.

We've got about 100k pieces of content with related & recent posts that'll populate on each page as cache invalidation happens on a publishing event. The current response time from publishing to a live audience article is somewhere in the 5s-30s range.

As I've developed my smaller Gridsome projects, I do see the build times increasing. However, I haven't been able to get a feel for how the quantity of content relates to consecutive build times where one to three pieces of content are added or updated every hour.

Something I wonder about Gridsome is how efficiently the build cache works at a scale of tens or hundreds of thousands of pages. Obviously, it wouldn't be ideal for a news org if the whole platform has to be rebuilt for 30 minutes each time a piece of content is updated.

This very well could be something I just prototype to gather info on my own and get a feel for real-world scenarios and scalability. I can't seem to find any info online about how Gridsome handles this kind of scale and if there are any issues that boil up besides build-time complexity potentially becoming a deal-breaker.

Any insight from the wiser of us who have been around the block would be wonderfully appreciated

Anecdote

Just to give some rationale to why I'm considering going SSG on top of Vue, the pain points of being locked into a custom WP theme have created quite a bit of technical debt and we're looking to become more agile with more powerful frontend capabilities, better page speeds, and better SEO scores.

Top comments (5)

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milindsingh profile image
Milind Singh

This is a great question. I am too searching for answers.

  1. Surgical builds (yet in ideation phase) would solve the problem, as I plan to trigger webhooks on publish.
  2. Hybrid content rendering, add client side Vue components rendered directly via api data on page load.
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anthonygushu profile image
Anthony Gushu

I read a lot more into the build stage of Gridsome since I posted this and saw that they have slotted adding incremental builds to their roadmap which would greatly reduce build times across the board by making heavier use of the build cache. Seems like that’s a really difficult problem to solve. Next.js on the React side seems to be the only SSG that’s implemented it out so far, making it arguably the only massively scalable JS SSG solution right now.

Although, Nuxt.js seems to be nearing an implementation which I assume may influence the speed at which Gridsome also rolls out an own implementation of their own. That’ll be a game changer for SSG with Vue

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pmfeo profile image
Pablo

Do you think it's a good idea to implement Gridsome over a Woocomerce production site? I feel it's yet on an early development stage.

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anthonygushu profile image
Anthony Gushu

Yes! I’m using it with BigCommerce and NetlifyCMS without issue. Gridsome has integrations with WordPress and I think there’s a plug-in specific to Woocommerce as well

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imthedeveloper profile image
ImTheDeveloper

Hey Tony - Sorry for pulling this one out of the depths of the internet but wondered if you had any repos with gridsome and bigcommerce. I'm just starting to take a look at a similar setup