We moved Railway's frontend off Next.js. Builds went from 10+ mins to under two

It’s absolutely mind boggling to me that we have gotten to a point that building a web frontend takes longer than compiling the Linux kernel..

I just tried their domains page it took 10.8MB of data and took 2s for the DOM to be ready.

page actually took 17s to fully render with multiple shift changes.

all to render a domain search bar similar to google home page.

https://railway.com/domains

A lot of the LLMs are very familiar with next.js and vercel is also aggressively building an ecosystem around their tooling for LLMs. So I wonder if this problem will only be exacerbated when everyone using LLMs is strongly nudged (forced) to use next?

We went through a very similar migration. Had a Next.js landing page and a separate TanStack Router SPA - consolidated both into a single Vite + TanStack Start app. Same experience with build times and the architecture mismatch: our app is heavily client-side with real-time state, and fighting Next.js's server-first assumptions wasn't worth it. TanStack Router's type-safe routing and file-based route generation have been great.

I have a Nextjs heavy app which takes around 7 minutes currently. But I've been thinking of moving away from next for a long time now. TanStack seems to be a good fit. This gives me a bit more confidence in just doing it.

The irony is deploying NextJS on the railway platform is super slow since they use containers, on Vercel 2 min is like 12 min on railway, deployments on a vps are only like 20 seconds.

*I know this is just build time, so this is different then their deployement time

Two minutes is still way too long. What are we doing? This is ridiculous.

Incredible that the builds were ever 10min. How far things have regressed.

:suprised_pikachu_face:

Is the quality of software engineers really dropped that low that people get excited when they move off from "heavy bloated" frameworks to lighter alternatives? Or is this just SEO farming garbage to position the company higher in search results?

They don't even mention the Next.js version used - where they using Turbopack or not?

Anyone tried to use vinext from Cloudflare in production? Might be faster.

But seriously, not sure why NextJS builds take so much, we are using stable and functional pages router in DollarDeploy and it is still takes too much time to build.

This is one of the most frustrating thing about working with NextJS. There seems to be no way to improve the speed of building the app.

Wait till you use HTMX!

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Reminder, as its not mentioned:

Next.js is produced by Vercel, a competitor to Railway.