Load times when developing

Do you have any tips on improving load times when we’re in “development” mode? So when our JS is not build.

We see a lot of requests for all the .js and .less files, a page takes up to 35 secs to load in Chrome (Edge and FF are slower).
We tried Steal’s dev-bundle but the gains were minimal.

Is it good practice to setup a Grunt-watcher which precompiles our LESS to a single CSS file?

Also steal-tools takes up to 2 minutes to build our app, can we improve this?
But to be clear, when we load the production build file, everything is fast.

Any thoughts?

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It surprises me that a dev-bundle didn’t help much. On the last project I looked at, dev-bundle shaved 10s off a 23s load time.

Are the majority of the requests for application code? [I’m assuming that’s the case if dev-bundle didn’t help much.] What’s the mix of js/less/etc.?

Also, what operating system & Node version?

@chasen we’ve run the tests again and it seems like an improvement of about 10 secs. Maybe we did something wrong before.
Our machine are all Macbook Pro’s with Node 9.2.0 and we run our code in a Vagrant box with Node 8.9.1.

Dev-bundle takes about a minute to build and production build more than 2 minutes. (with bundles and source-maps)
Is this a normal speed?

I get the impression that the “old” way with Grunt our compile times were a fraction of now, ofcourse without bundles and source-maps.

Regarding speeding up dev load times, have you considered making your app progressively load?

Yes, we have. But problably not enough. We’ve only made two seperate bundles, the “main” pages and the “admin” pages.