[underwater]

We use Gatsby with Contentful for our marketing site and blog. It's been a nightmare.

We publish content multiple times a week. It's taken a huge amount of effort and paying Gatsby a lot of money for their SaaS products to get a setup that any serious publisher (like a newspaper) would laugh at.

The whole product being built around static site generation is a huge limitation. Things like republishing at a reasonable cadence and previewing changes require massive kludges and huge amounts of infrastructure to make work.

Static site generation is a niche product. Gatsby are trying to replace dynamic server side rendering, and in the short term will win people over with the upsides. But long term people are going to hate the limitations.

[morcutt]

I've been involved in a site that has over 10k pages and it worked fine. Sanity has a preview feature and Gatsby incremental builds are available now (which I haven't used yet) but should bring your build times down significantly.

[underwater]

We use Gatsby preview. It frustrates me that we are paying a lot of money for a substandard solution to a problem that shouldn't exist.

The same goes for Gatsby incremental builds. We don't want to run a web server, so instead we should pay to run a build server 24/7 so we can have a warm cache available when we need to build!?

The annoying part is that there is not reason a static site generator should have these limitations. Gatsby's entire revenue model is based on solving problems that only exist because of the bad architectural decisions in their open source product.

[floydnoel]

why don’t you use the SSR plugin and go that route?

[underwater]

I'm not sure what problem that would solve.

Our problems stem from the fact that Gatsby's architecture is based around assembling an in-memory model and GraphQL schema for all possible data nodes, and then generating pages by querying from that store.

These operations are dependent on each other, so Gatsby can't do things like fetch just the data needed for a single page. It's also error prone because it adds a whole bunch of complexity to everything they do: https://www.gatsbyjs.org/docs/gatsby-internals/

That kind of complexity is not needed for something that is inherently a pretty simple problem.