How can I speed up Angular CLI Live Reload - 1-2 minutes per change

Question

I have been using AngularCLI for my ng2 project and for the last few months it has been great. In the last few weeks, it seems to be getting slower and slower.

If I make a simple HTML change it now takes between 1 and 2 minutes to run with "ng serve" and refresh the browser. NodeJS consumes a lot of RAM and CPU when this happens.

I ran the same code and process on a new laptop next to me and it takes around 20 seconds. I am currently using CLI 1.0.0-beta.21 on Windows Home 10. I have 8 gigs ram/SSD/i7.

I have tried:

• Deleting and reinstalling Node Modules
• Upgrading to latest CLI version
• Turning off Windows Defender (and excluding Node/and proj folder from scans)

All to no avail.

Here is the output:

webpack: bundle is now INVALID.
6938ms building modules
72ms sealing
4ms optimizing
1ms basic module optimization
1074ms module optimization
5ms advanced module optimization
149ms basic chunk optimization
1ms chunk optimization
1ms advanced chunk optimization
702ms module and chunk tree optimization
2202ms module reviving
55ms module order optimization
71ms module id optimization
181ms chunk reviving
20ms chunk order optimization
806ms chunk id optimization
544ms hashing
7ms module assets processing
924ms chunk assets processing
45ms additional chunk assets processing
3ms recording
1ms additional asset processing
22536ms chunk asset optimization
1063ms asset optimization
545ms emitting
[default] Checking started in a separate process...
Hash: dedfa5a221b1992287d6
Version: webpack 2.1.0-beta.25
Time: 88912ms
                               Asset     Size  Chunks             Chunk Names
bb73d75e8296ab5bc0a26b5d82006129.png  74.3 kB
                      main.bundle.js  7.26 MB    0, 2  [emitted]  main
                    styles.bundle.js  43.2 kB    1, 2             styles
                    inline.bundle.js  5.54 kB       2             inline
                   styles.bundle.map  58.7 kB    1, 2             styles
                   inline.bundle.map   5.6 kB       2             inline
                     main.bundle.map  8.03 MB    0, 2  [emitted]  main
Child html-webpack-plugin for "index.html":
         Asset     Size  Chunks       Chunk Names
    index.html  8.11 kB       0
webpack: bundle is now VALID.

Answer 1

Sorry to answer my own question, but I found a solution much to my surprise!

I found this NPM Package called "ember-cli-windows" which claims to be for specific Windows machines to disable Windows Defender (although I did try this) and Indexing.

I ran it and then also turned off Windows indexing completely and have now got the speed back down to 20 seconds (instead of 180).

[default] Checking started in a separate process...
Hash: ec2bcf489f8813c827a2
Version: webpack 2.1.0-beta.25
Time: 21055ms
                               Asset     Size  Chunks             Chunk Names
bb73d75e8296ab5bc0a26b5d82006129.png  74.3 kB
                      main.bundle.js  7.26 MB    0, 2  [emitted]  main
                    styles.bundle.js  43.2 kB    1, 2             styles
                    inline.bundle.js  5.54 kB       2             inline
                   styles.bundle.map  58.7 kB    1, 2             styles
                   inline.bundle.map   5.6 kB       2             inline
                     main.bundle.map  8.03 MB    0, 2  [emitted]  main
Child html-webpack-plugin for "index.html":
         Asset     Size  Chunks       Chunk Names
    index.html  8.11 kB       0
webpack: bundle is now VALID.

Answer 2

The latest beta of Angular CLI (19-24 at the time of writing), improve the build time quite a bit too. There's also a new flag (not sure if documented) you can use --progress false which also helps (works with ng build and ng serve).

There're also other flags not set for speed by default (you don't need to do anything about them) like verbose which is set to false by default.

More here:
https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/blob/master/packages/angular-cli/commands/serve.ts

Answer 3

For anybody in 2021, you can add --source-map=false it reduced my reload time by half.