[Support Guide] How long should Netlify builds take?

Support Support Guides
,
1

Last updated by Netlify Support in October 2024

The only universal answer to this is: it varies. :slight_smile: More detail would probably be helpful, right? Below we explain which factors affect the lengths of builds on Netlify

One key factor is the site itself. Larger sites will take longer to build than smaller ones, and things like images and video can impact this (if those assets need to be downloaded or processed during build).

Another factor is the static site generator (SSG) being used (if any). The performance of SSGs varies widely. If the site takes a long time to build locally, that will also carry over to Netlify.

Also, the systems which handle the site builds are a shared resource (amongst Netlify users). When the network is under heavy load, newly scheduled builds will be queued instead of beginning immediately. When the load is high on the build system, and when utilizing our our Starter or Pro team plans, it is normal for builds to queue for up to fifteen (15) minutes.

Also when the load is high, it is possible that your build will be competing for scarce CPU/memory resources. Your build is guaranteed only 4 CPUs and 8 GiB memory. This is could be less than your local systems, so times will not likely match your local unless you use a very efficient SSG like hugo.

Finally, what happens in the situation where many git push actions occur in a short time window while there is queuing in the build network? (And it’s a good question!)

Answer: each push will trigger a deploy with Netlify but only the first and last actually build & deploy.

Here is a more detailed explanation. Let’s imagine you run a git push five times in a few minutes. Let’s also pretend your build takes 10 minutes to complete, so the last 4 deploys are queued.

So, what happens? Well, all five pushes will create deploys in your deploy listings page in the Netlify admin UI, and all will show as ‘building’ in the UI. But when the first deploy completes, the intermediate builds will all change to the status ‘skipped’ and then Netlify will build the last (most recent) deploy. We don’t waste our time or yours publishing builds that will be overwritten immediately.

Three more considerations around time to deploy, rather than just build:

  1. once built, we must UPLOAD any changed files! The more you change, the longer it takes to upload. This article talks in detail about reducing the number of unintentional changes in your builds
  2. This article runs through all the potential optimizations you could make around what you build, when you build, and how you build it.

Regardless, if you notice unusually long queuing times for builds, something might be wrong! Please let us know in the comments below.

3 Likes
2

@luke Thanks for shedding some light on how the builds are working.I’ve seeing many users complaining about this. This is a real problem.
One common question i’m seeing in netlify/community - Gitter is about System resources: How many RAM and CPU is available during build?
To be honest i taught build times are set to 30 mins before, because we were seeing timeouts after 30 mins, it could be just an illusion.
One solution might to have a more finer grained pricing solution between the starter and the pro where we can buy build time resources. The Pro tier is really about Team collaboration which makes sense, enabling 3 concurrent builds makes sense, but does the build resources are bigger in the PRO tier?

4

Hi, @zltnvrs. There is additional time allowed for post-processing and uploads. This is likely the reason for timeouts happening in 30 minutes instead of 15.

For additional build resources (for example, longer build times) a Business tier plan is required. <- Edited on 2020-10-27 as this has changed and hasn’t been true for some time.

Regarding the RAM and CPU available in the build image, I am hoping someone else here at Netlify can answer that question.

1 Like
7

You should count on your builds having only 15 minutes to complete their build command. The additional time for processing and uploading will be added to that and do not need to complete within that initial 15 minutes, and in some cases for very large sites or if our system is busy, they may stretch out to minutes or even an hour (the latter only for tens of thousands of new files in a deploy).

Around unexpected timeouts, I’d suggest some reading here: [Support Guide] Hung or stuck, but seemingly successful build . There are builds that legitimately run for more than 15 minutes, but most cases are something like that: “oops, I started a server” or “my framework left some processes running that made Netlify think the build wasn’t done yet”.

Regarding build resources, what you are guaranteed on our free and Pro plans is identical: approximately 1 CPU and around 2Gb of memory. You may get more - these containers run on machines that could hold 5 other simultaneous builds…or 0 others. The available memory also has to cover the linux instance that runs within the build environment.

Business-level customers can scale to just about any size and length build; we have some running 24Gb builds with a 3 hour timeout (these builds tend to do things like scrape data from several sources and build every page from scratch on sites with >10,000 files).

@zltnvrs, Your suggestion about pricing was not missed and I’ve additionally mentioned it to our sales and marketing teams that set our pricing. They love hearing feedback like that as they make decisions about our future offerings, so please keep it coming!

3 Likes
18

This thread still does not give at least an upper limit. I’m just trying Netlify and my first build for a small site (Hugo, < 100 pages) says “Deploy in progress”, and has been saying that for over 24 hours, while the deploy log just says “10:36:05 AM: There is no log for this deploy”, which I feel is probably not normal, even for the free plan.

Any confirmation about that duration ?

19

Hi, @fgm, and welcome to the Netlify community site. :+1:

This topic is about sites which are using our continuous deployment process with git backed deploys:

The message you are seeing (“There is no log for this deploy”) is a message which is displayed when using manual deploys.

Manual deploys don’t have a build time limit because there is no build step with a manual deploy.

The time it will take for a manual deploy to complete is affected mostly by two factors: the total size of the files and the total number of files being deployed.

What are those two values (total size and total number of files) for the site being deployed? Also, are you using drag and drop or the Netlify CLI to deploy?

If the deploy is taking over 24 hours it is unlikely to succeed. Regardless of the answers above, it will almost certainly be best to cancel this deploy and try again.