Downsides with disabling TraceEntryPointsPlugin?

[karlhorky]

Summary

I'm experimenting with ways to improve build performance in webpack, and I came across the suggestion to disable TraceEntryPointsPlugin (which appears to also disable @vercel/nft):

next.config.ts

  webpack: (config: Configuration, { isServer }) => {
    if (isServer) {
      config.plugins = (config.plugins as WebpackPluginInstance[]).filter(
        (plugin) => plugin.constructor?.name !== 'TraceEntryPointsPlugin'
      );
    }
    return config;
  }

This removed 92s of build time, but I'm unsure as to the downsides of this.

Is this feature the Next.js 12 Output File Tracing feature?

Next.js 12 automatically traces which files are needed by each page and API route using @vercel/nft, and outputs these trace results next to the next build output, allowing integrators to leverage the traces Next.js provides automatically.

Does that mean that this plugin can be disabled for performance at the cost of knowing which files are absolutely needed for the build?

I also wonder whether simple self-hosted Next.js setups without any integration with the tracing also would get something out of disabling this plugin... 🤔

With TraceEntryPointsPlugin

437s for next-build, 92s for node-file-trace-build

$ rm -r .next && time npm run build

...

npm run build  562.03s user 188.86s system 169% cpu 7:22.23 total

Without TraceEntryPointsPlugin

324s for next-build, no entry for node-file-trace-build

$ rm -r .next && time npm run build

...

npm run build  350.96s user 168.63s system 154% cpu 5:36.00 total

Additional information

--

Example

No response

[jithin-jz]

❓Should you disable TraceEntryPointsPlugin?
👉 If you're self-hosting your Next.js app (e.g., on your own server, VPS, Docker container, etc.): YES, you can safely disable it.
You’ll get a big boost in build performance, and you won’t lose anything important, as long as you're bundling your whole app anyway.

[karlhorky]

@mischnic has confirmed a few things offline, thanks! 🙌

What that NFT feature does is determine which externals you reference in server-side code, so that output: "standalone" can copy those over into .next/standalone (and if you don't use output: "standalone", so that the Vercel CLI knows what to upload)