pnpm runs scripts with notable delay compared to yarn and npm

[ebeloded]

pnpm version: 6.2.1

pnpm offers great developer experience, for which I am very grateful 🙏🏻. However, I noticed that running scripts with pnpm is visibly slower than running them with yarn or npm. For example, a simple echo with pnpm finishes in 0.5s, whereas yarn gets back in 0.2s.

// package.json:
{
  "scripts": {
    "echo": "echo test"
  }
}

> time pnpm echo

pnpm echo  0.52s

> time yarn echo

yarn echo 0.18s

This is not a feature request per se, but rather a request for improvement. Hopefully, the run performance can get much closer to a direct script call.

The floor seems to be at ~0.05s for me with this setup:

// echo.js
const { exec } = require('child_process')

exec('echo hello', (err, stdout) => {
  console.log(`${stdout}`)
})

> time node echo.js
node echo.js  0.05s

[zkochan]

The best solution would be to wrap pnpm with some native code (Rust, Reason, Go?) and use it to run scripts.

An easier to implement solution would be to add some code to pnpm.cjs that will load a smaller bundle of code when scripts should be executed.

[zkochan]

I have published an experimental version of pnpm, where I bundled pnpm with pkg. It is published as @pnpm/beta.

This version of pnpm is much faster at startup.

the pnpm version bundled with pkg:

[zoltan@fedora inb]$ time pnpm f

> inb@1.0.0 f /home/zoltan/src/sandbox/inb
> echo hi

hi

real    0m0.183s
user    0m0.159s
sys     0m0.030s

the pnpm version that is NOT bundled with pkg:

[zoltan@fedora inb]$ time pnpm f

> inb@1.0.0 f /home/zoltan/src/sandbox/inb
> echo hi

hi

real    0m0.475s
user    0m0.446s
sys     0m0.036s

[ebeloded]

Cool idea.

Couldn't get it installed on Mac:

[zkochan]

I did not build an artifact for macOS yet.

[ebeloded]

I also tried in a Docker container:

FROM node:12-slim
RUN npm i -g @pnpm/beta

[ebeloded]

Oh. Got it. You only built an artifact for win, right? This is cool.

Are there any drawbacks to using pkg?

[zkochan]

There are currently two artifacts. For linux-x64 and win-x64

https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/tree/main/packages/artifacts

so I think it should work in that docker image. Seems like there is issue with npm. Try to install with sudo. Or try to install it not globally but in some directory

[zkochan]

I hope pkg has no drawbacks because I have big plans: #3434

[zkochan]

I released an artifact for macOS x64 as well.