Significant Performance decrease between 3.0.3 and 4.0.0

[MobiusHorizons]

I Manage a gulp build process that runs sass through bless.
The build process was taking ~7 seconds using gulp-bless v3.0.1 and bless 3.0.3.
I upgraded today to gulp-bless 3.10 which includes bless 4.0.0, and build times went up from ~7s to 93s.

Obviously this is completely unacceptable.

I suppose the problem could lie with gulp-bless, but i don't know how to test that.

[DrEnter]

Can attest to seeing exactly the same issue using grunt-bless 1.0.2 / bless-4.0.2 so I don't think it's a gulp-bless issue.

[AaronAsAChimp]

After profiling it seems to be a bad interaction between Marak/colors.js and reworkcss/css as documented in reworkcss/css#88, a workaround would be to run blessc with the --no-color option.

[mtscout6]

I'm curious how Chalk would do, it has better cross platform support and doesn't modify the String prototype. Pull requests are welcome.

[MobiusHorizons]

@mtscout6 sounds like it could help, I may have some time to look at this again, if I do, I'll try that route.

[w0rp]

I would like to note that this is still an issue if you are using grunt-bless. If you try creating a large CSS file which will be split up into three smaller files with grunt-bless, and compare the time taken with bless before and after, grunt-bless@0.2.0 is much faster than grunt-bless@1.0.2. Here are some times from my codebase, for each version, including the time taken to start up grunt, which is around 5 seconds.

With grunt-bless version 0.2.0: (bless version 3 or so)

real  0m5.627s
user  0m5.436s
sys   0m0.252s

With grunt-bless version 1.0.2: (bless version 4 or so)

real  0m29.497s
user  0m29.360s
sys   0m0.452s

[mtscout6]

The update with the change to chalk was in 4.0.4. Are you testing with that version?

[w0rp]

I believe I should be. I cleanly installed from npm again and grunt-bless seems to be set to ~4.0.0.

https://github.com/BlessCSS/grunt-bless/blob/master/package.json#L40

[AaronAsAChimp]

You can confirm the version by running:

$ npm list bless

If you could also try running blessc directly. It should help us narrow in on the issue.

[w0rp]

Sure. I'll find the file I was testing this against a little later and see if I can get a similar speed out of blessc directly. Maybe I can also create an example file I can share.

[w0rp]

I was able to run bless on the file via blessc directly, and it executed quite quickly. I don't have experience with the NodeJS profiling tools to see where the issue lies, but I believe the issue might actually lie in grunt-bless, and not in bless itself. It's hard to tell. All I know is, grunt-bless on version 0.2.0 executes much more quickly.

I unfortunately probably cannot share the CSS file I am using. I imagine any file large enough to be split into two files will do, though.

[AaronAsAChimp]

It appears to be the same culprit, if any dependency brings in colors.js you'll see a degradation of performance. In this case Grunt (via grunt-legacy-log) uses the library.

Unfortunately moving to chalk only mitigates the problem. The responsibility for fixing this issue lies with ReworkCSS.