Development environment initial page load performance

[mschuepbach]

Hi, whenever I run the "Serve Gramps Web Frontend" task, it builds for about 10 seconds and then it takes another 40 seconds until the page loads. Is this normal?

I also noticed the --watch flag in the dev server script. Does that mean that hot-reload should work? Because it does not seem to work for me.

I would love to have a faster development cycle.

[DavidMStraub]

Demo on my machine:

Bildschirmaufzeichnung.vom.2025-09-16.19-44-05.webm

What takes quite long for me is the backend to start up...

I also have the problem that after waking up from suspend, hot reload is often broken until I restart the task.

[mschuepbach]

Okay I think I will set it up again from scratch. Hopefully that will fix it.

[DavidMStraub]

Did you try just rebuilding the dev container (and/or updating VS Code)?

[mschuepbach]

Rebuilding the dev container didn't help and VS Code was already up-to-date. I also tried updating Docker.
While setting it up from scratch I noticed the better I/O performance link from this VS Code notification:

After setting the containers up with Dev Containers: Clone Repository in Container Volume... command it's much faster and hot reload also works.

[DavidMStraub]

What OS are you on?

[mschuepbach]

Windows

[DavidMStraub]

Ok interesting, I'm on Ubuntu, so I suspect it's a difference in I/O performance when using native Docker vs Docker Desktop. Might be something we have to add to the docs.