Markdown performance discrepancy

[j9t]

In The Future of 11ty, there’s the following slide:

I.e., for 4,000 Markdown files, the export—if I understood correctly—would take only 1.8 seconds.

What I observe in one project at the moment, with 7,000 minimal Markdown files (where “minimal” means close to no content, and therefore no actual files to export), is an export time of roughly 150 seconds. While this is on an 2019 Intel iMac, performance on a 2022 M1 is about twice as fast, but still slow in comparison—48 times slower, or 24 times in the case of the M1.

These differences seem huge.

@zachleat (though really open to anyone, of course), does this check out? Can you share more about your own tests? Would there be interest in checking out the project where I observe said slow performance (it’s private, but I can give access)? The difference may certainly also be due to other factors, but maybe there’s something of mutual interest and value here.