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We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

blog.railway.com

101–110 of 230 posts

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#101
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if they weren't using Turbopack.

does turbopack make such a difference on next.js sites?

Yes, because it is yet another Typescript and Webpack like compiler written in Rust.

Note how many HNers are making the same remark.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#102
post #78
post #36

I just tried their domains page it took 10.8MB of data and took 2s for the DOM to be ready. page actually took 17s to fully render with multiple shift changes. all to render a domain search bar similar to google home page. https://railway.com/domains

web dev is a sewer All my projects are server rendered with jinja/minijinja, bootstrap, jQuery, and htmx when I need a little bit of SPA behavior on forms. No builds, just static <script src= tags. Very fast and easy. I'll never recommend anything else.

When I am given the choice to pick a stack, it is classical Java and .NET Web frameworks, with minimal JavaScript.

On hobby projects same script approach without any kind of build step.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#103

I have a Nextjs heavy app which takes around 7 minutes currently. But I've been thinking of moving away from next for a long time now. TanStack seems to be a good fit. This gives me a bit more confidence in just doing it.

Is server-rendered HTML that bad for 2026 web or is everyone building complex apps? Many of my customers insists on using Next.js or similar but when I browse their website I don't get the point. They are downloading and executing megabytes of JS while in-page interactions tends to be limited to few basic stuff. Never seen one of their project requiring offline mode. Maybe that's being able to easily replace a [FRAME…

It is fashionable, and Vercel has made a chain of partners that make Next.js/React the only official option to extend SaaS products.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#104
post #31

The irony is deploying NextJS on the railway platform is super slow since they use containers, on Vercel 2 min is like 12 min on railway, deployments on a vps are only like 20 seconds. *I know this is just build time, so this is different then their deployement time

Not containers to blame but overprovisioning and how much resources dedicated to building. I am not sure how Vercel gets things build in literal seconds, but, hey, they are the creators of NextJS. At DollarDeploy we building it also in containers but every build get 4GB/2CPU so it is quite fast but not as fast as Vercel.

Turbopack, custom runtime infrastructure on top of AWS Lambda.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the situation now, but a while ago there were a lot of pushback using Next.js because it was not easy to use all features if not hosted on Vercel.

We used NextJS on a project hosted on AWS a while ago. We learned quickly it wasn't the best tool for what we wanted to do which is why we stopped using it. But it's an open source project whose purpose is to drive devs to Vercel. It doesn't surprise me that there are some features that work best with Vercel (but it does surprise me that only recently other providers started to need adapters). Anyway, my point is tha…

Besides the way it maps server side code into serverless, it has a custom runtime, functions that expose cloud infrastructure, integration with multiple language runtimes for the backend.

You get to pick Vercel + headless CMS + assets managed + eshop, and you're done in terms of big corporations.

Might seem a lot in licenses, however it allows for smaller dev teams, which is what management floor cares about, all those salaries.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#106

Wait till you use HTMX!

As in, htmx is better? I haven't used it but last I looked into it I was extremely confused as to whether it was a meme, an actual framework, or both.

HTMX is great when your web interface is just a representation of a server state.

If web interface is an application backed by a remote state HTMX falls apart.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#107
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone so afraid to get a $5/mo Ubuntu/Debian VPS, install nginx and call it a day? Then you can even run multiple projects off the same server.

I just did this over at Hetzner and Claude admins it for me so I don't need to learn the CLI or anything, describe the proxying I want, and it setups up a bunch of small side project pages for me.

How do you use Claude to admin it? Does Claude SSH into the server and do everything or just write bash scripts?

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#108
post #7

We went through a very similar migration. Had a Next.js landing page and a separate TanStack Router SPA - consolidated both into a single Vite + TanStack Start app. Same experience with build times and the architecture mismatch: our app is heavily client-side with real-time state, and fighting Next.js's server-first assumptions wasn't worth it. TanStack Router's type-safe routing and file-based route generation have…

I hadn't heard of TanStack but a quick look at their website doesn't inspire confidence tbh. I mean, just take "TanStack Pacer". It provides such things as: ``` import { Debouncer } from '@tanstack/pacer' // class const debouncer = new Debouncer(fn, options) debouncer.maybeExecute(args) // execute the debounced function debouncer.cancel() // cancel the debounced function debouncer.flush() // flush the debounced funct…

TanStack started out by providing a very good JS table library. Now they offer a Router, and some more libs. They are definitely an up and coming name in the JS space.

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#109
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 3.57MB background PNG is hilarious [0] [0] https://railway.com/dots-oxipng.png

Ha! I normally wouldn’t find it quite so hilarious, but it’s a stylistically pixelated image. There’s just too much irony packed in there to not chuckle.

It's more halftone (might not be the correct term), not pixelated

There might be more irony in saying it's stylized pixels without realizing that the style of the image can't be replicated with blocks of the same size but I dunno, I'm not Alanis Morissette

Re: We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under 2

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dear lord. It's actually laggy for me to scroll on that page.

same here and I'm using a beefy MacBook (Apple M4 Max, 64gb ram). something is wrong with the front end code. there are a lot of animations, so my hunch would be that something goes wrong there.

Moore said computers get twice as fast every 18 months. Web devs took that as a challenge.
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