Improving rendering performance

[karthik2804]

While working on #91, I noticed that the content body of every .md file is parsed on every request. This induces a potential performance hit. I feel like this could be an area for performance optimization of the rendering process as I think it is unnecessary to parse the markdown content of files other than the one that is requested. The required details for the post can be obtained from the header.

I realize that this would disrupt the way in which the posts in a blog would be listed where the content appears below the title but I feel like it is a problem that can be solved by using the description in the head. One compromise would be to only parse the markdown if the head.description is empty.

Any thoughts?

[karthik2804]

Based on some experimentation not running the body of every article through the markdown parser seems to make a significant difference in the performance.
With parsing the markdown content

bombardier -c 1 -n 1000 http://localhost:3000/
Bombarding http://localhost:3000/ with 1000 request(s) using 1 connection(s)
 1000 / 1000 [========================================================================================================================================================] 100.00% 41/s 24s
Done!
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec        41.47       8.38     117.03
  Latency       24.14ms     3.74ms    41.19ms
  HTTP codes:
    1xx - 0, 2xx - 1000, 3xx - 0, 4xx - 0, 5xx - 0
    others - 0
  Throughput:     1.47MB/s

Without parsing the markdown content

bombardier -c 1 -n 1000 http://localhost:3000/
Bombarding http://localhost:3000/ with 1000 request(s) using 1 connection(s)
 1000 / 1000 [========================================================================================================================================================] 100.00% 65/s 15s
Done!
Statistics        Avg      Stdev        Max
  Reqs/sec        66.26      23.45     105.03
  Latency       15.09ms   621.28us    20.05ms
  HTTP codes:
    1xx - 0, 2xx - 1000, 3xx - 0, 4xx - 0, 5xx - 0
    others - 0
  Throughput:     2.29MB/s

Also, an added benefit of not parsing the markdown content is that once the rhai shortcodes #91 gets merged, the performance of pages that don't use shortcodes will not incur a performance penalty due to other pages utilizing shortcodes.

[karthik2804]

Closed by #103 and associated PR #104.