How to speed up vite build for production builds

[KieranP]

When I run vite build, it is doing a lot of processing when almost nothing has changed. e.g. I have 100 entrypoint files, each with different imports (some shared, some unique). Regardless of whether I change a shared import or just the entrypoint file, or even if I change nothing, everything is being rebuilt during vite build (the mtime changes on all the files).

If I run vite build twice in a row with no changes in between, both builds take the same time and all files get an updated mtime. There appears to be a lack of caching between builds, even though I have cache: true in my config. This is important because I have a lot of node_modules that don't change between builds, yet need to rebuilt each time :-(

I thought maybe caching was invalidated because of using functions for assetFileNames, chunkFileNames, and entryFileNames, but replacing them with strings didn't help either.

This isn't an issue on my local machine (Apple M4 Pro, 24GB). vite build takes about 15s. But on production servers (Intel, 2vCPU, 4GB), it takes upwards of 5 minutes...

Is this expected? Does vite always recalculate everything we no build caching? Or might something be wrong in my setup/config?

[misakamayako]

I think the time cost is necessary because Vite doesn't know your previous output or what changes you made. Even if it did know your output, it might still need to compare the differences between the previous output and the current files, which is obviously more difficult to implement and requires more time;. it's better to recompile from scratch.
And if you did have to do that, try with pnpm workspace or use env variable in build command to build specific entrypoint. not to put all 100 entrypoint to one vite config