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

blog.railway.com

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

#21

Post by nixpulvis »

Hamuko wrote: post #8
maccard wrote: post #3

It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that we have gotten to a point that building a web frontend takes longer than compiling the Linux kernel..

As a non-frontend developer mainly observing and touching something here and there, a lot of the things that frontend developers do seem vastly over-engineered.

Same reason why 90% of websites have serious UX issues and constant bugs. This and ad frameworks.

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

#24

Post by cryptonym »

UserMark wrote: post #10

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 [FRAMEWORK] dev with another.

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

#25

Post by wilson090 »

UserMark wrote: post #10

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.

Are you on turbopack? It's available on Next 16 and just took our build times down from 6 minutes to 2 minutes

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

#26

Post by fnoef »

:suprised_pikachu_face:

Is the quality of software engineers really dropped that low that people get excited when they move off from "heavy bloated" frameworks to lighter alternatives? Or is this just SEO farming garbage to position the company higher in search results?

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

#27

Post by wilson090 »

samwreww wrote: post #12

They don't even mention the Next.js version used - where they using Turbopack or not?

excellent question - recently switched from turbopack after getting annoyed by build times. we saw them go from 6 mins to 2 mins

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

#28

Post by nomel »

UserMark wrote: post #10

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.

I made two serious attempts to get into front end web development, around 5 years apart. Both times I started with the most popular framework. Both times the most popular framework was something different before I even finished the project.

Looks like maybe things haven't changed much?

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

#29

Post by SilverSlash »

A lot of the LLMs are very familiar with next.js and vercel is also aggressively building an ecosystem around their tooling for LLMs. So I wonder if this problem will only be exacerbated when everyone using LLMs is strongly nudged (forced) to use next?

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

#30

Post by itopaloglu83 »

Hamuko wrote: post #8
maccard wrote: post #3

It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that we have gotten to a point that building a web frontend takes longer than compiling the Linux kernel..

As a non-frontend developer mainly observing and touching something here and there, a lot of the things that frontend developers do seem vastly over-engineered.

It’s mind blowing when you check the generated code, because it goes over 50 elements deep for a simple looking website.

Makes me think that there’s no way this is computationally efficient either.

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