No daemon, and still quick when nothing changed

vx runs no background process. When nothing changed, a run over 9,603
tasks still finishes in 799 ms.

Runner	Nothing changed	Daemon
vx	799 ms	none
Turborepo	927 ms	not for turbo run
Nx	24.15 s	off, as in CI

Synthetic monorepo, 1,601 projects, 9,603 tasks · linux x64, 4 cores, concurrency 10 · vx 0be036747, Turborepo 2.11.10, Nx 24.0.1 · 2026-10-23 · benchmarks

Nx runs a daemon by default. Turborepo shipped one and, since 2.8.11,
no longer uses it for turbo run.

A daemon can be wrong

A daemon keeps its own copy of your tree. One missed file event and that
copy is wrong. For a build cache, wrong means old bytes under a green
check.

vx reads the tree fresh, every run

Each run asks git, which already holds a hash for every clean file. A
clean tree is keyed with no read of a source file
(how).

Config comes from the lock file, so no vx.config.ts is evaluated. A
hit on an up-to-date tree only checks that the outputs are there
(how).

That is the 799 ms. Nothing stays running after it, and a run in a
terminal, in CI or in a container gives the same answer.

More at vznjs.github.io/vx.

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Originally published on the vx blog. vx is open-source (MIT) task orchestration with a build cache: vznjs.github.io/vx · GitHub.

_{Written with AI assistance.}