Suggestion: parallelization of the build pipeline (or part of it)

[langestefan]

I frequently have to wait a significant amount of time while building docs using Documenter.jl. Now when building docs as part of the CI, this is not such a huge problem. But when developing (using LiveServer.jl) it can slow you down quite a lot.

After some profiling, I found that by far the slowest step for me is expanding templates and (much less so) jldoctest. Since each template runs in its own (named) context, the most logical solution to me would be to parallelize this step first.

I am just looking for some feedback on whether this would be a wanted feature or not. Of course, this will feature would have to be backwards compatible, opt-in, and well-tested. It will require significant modification of the build pipeline because it is currently not set-up for multi-threading.

[fredrikekre]

Are you aware of the draft mode? It is very useful in a LiveServer.jl context.

[langestefan]

Yes, but typically I also want to see the output of @example blocks. I know that for larger Julia projects building docs can take several hours, which this should hopefully also help reduce.

[fredrikekre]

You can disable draft mode for specific pages you are working on.

[langestefan]

Sure, that is sufficient for many cases. Although I don't really want to have to fiddle around with draft mode, I just want fast builds out of the box in every situation.