performance: aws-cdk-lib takes too long to load

[eladb]

Is it because we are loading all submodules before we display the root module?

[eladb]

It seems like this is mostly network-bound. The UI must wait for assembly.json to be downloaded before it can render, and it seems like my slow network is why this is such a horrible experience.

The navigation bar is rendered immediately after the docs markdown is rendered, but information about submodules is only available in the assembly.json file (33MiB).

@RomainMuller @iliapolo @MrArnoldPalmer @gabewomble @Chriscbr What information do we need from assembly.json anyway? Besides information about submodules, it seems like we don't really need it and it's a huge file (for aws-cdk-lib it is

[eladb]

OK, basically, it seems to me that a quick win could be to basically remove the types section from the assembly. For aws-cdk-lib, for example, it will reduce the size from 33.1MiB to 1.1MiB.

We can do this without much risk - when we process packages in the backend, store another file for each package (e.g. assembly-slim.json) without the types section and then change our frontend to use this file instead of assembly.json).

[iliapolo]

The deployment will have to be two phased here, first backend + reprocess and then front end.

Or implement a fallback on the front end

[eladb]

OK, after going through the backend code, it seems like adding another file is going to be a bit of a project, so I am going to just delete types from assembly.json itself.

To verify this, I've patched up the webapp to delete types immediately after assembly.json is downloaded and verified that the experience is not broken, so I believe it is low risk to simply reprocess.