Performance Tuning Next.js

TL;DR: Next.js 9.3 introduces getStaticPaths, which allows you to generate a data-driven list of pages to render at build time, potentially allowing you to bypass server-side rendering for some use cases. You can now also use the fallback property to dynamically build pages on request, and serve the generated html instead.

On a recent project we built a website for a client using a combination of Next.js and Contentful headless CMS. The goal of the website was to offer a responsive experience across all devices whilst keeping load times to a minimum and supporting SEO.

I rather like Next.js – it combines the benefits of React with Server Side Rendering (SSR) and static html builds, enabling caching for quick initial page loads and SEO support. Once the cached SSR page has been downloaded, Next.js “hydrates” the page with React and all of the page components, completely seamlessly to the user.

The website is deployed to AWS using CloudFront and Lambda@Edge as our CDN and SSR platform. It works by executing a lambda for Origin Requests and caching the results in CloudFront. Regardless of where the page is rendered (client or server) Next.js runs the same code which in our case queries Contentful for content to display on the page, which is neat as the same code handles both scenarios.

During testing, we noticed that page requests that weren’t cached in CloudFront could take anything up to 10 seconds to render. Although this only affects requests that miss the cache, this wasn’t acceptable to us as it impacts every page that needs to be server-side generated, and the issue would also be replicated for every edge location in CloudFront. This issue only affects the first page load of a visitors session however, as subsequent requests are handled client-side and only the new page content and assets are downloaded.

Whilst investigating the issue we spotted that the majority of processing time was spent in the lambda. We added extra logging to output the elapsed time at various points in the lambda, and then created custom CloudWatch metrics from these to identify where most of the time was incurred.

We identified that the additional overhead was caused by javascript requiring the specific page’s javascript file embedded within the lambda, which is dynamically loaded for the page requested. It’s dynamically loaded to avoid loading all page assets when only rendering a single page, which would add considerable and unnecessary startup time to the lambda.

The lambda we used was based on the Next.js plugin available for the serverless framework, but as we were using Terraform we took the bits we needed from here to make it work https://github.com/serverless-nextjs/serverless-next.js/blob/master/README.md

Due to the overhead from the require statement, we experimented with the resource allocation given to the lambda. It was initially set to 128mb, so we played with various configurations and applied load against the website using JMeter to see if extra resources improved the responsiveness.

We found that by tweaking the memory allocation of the lambda, we could improve the average startup time from ~10 seconds to ~2 seconds. We found that the sweet spot was 368mb, just as the curve begins to flatten out. On the surface, increasing from 128mb to 368mb triples our lambda costs, however these are negligible as the lambda only runs on cache misses with most of our requests served from the CloudFront cache. That said adding extra resources for the sake of milliseconds would be superfluous and more expensive.

This improvement in speed was good enough for us, considering it impacted only a small percentage of visitors. A colleague of mine afterwards however suggested a couple of further refinements that could be made, which would reduce this impact even further. These options would require additional development effort which for us wasn’t possible at the time, but would make the website really responsive for all visitors.

Other strategies for mitigating the cold start issue

Multiple cache behaviours for different paths

By identifying which areas of your website are updated more often than others, you can mitigate the lambda issue by tweaking the cache expiries associated with them in CloudFront. For example, your homepage may change several times a day, whereas your news articles once published might stay fairly static. In this case, you could apply a short cache expiry to the root of your website / and a longer one for /news/*.

Invalidating CloudFront caches proactively

You could proactively invalidate CloudFront caches whenever content on your website changes. CloudFront allows you to specify a path to evict the cache for, so you can be really specific on what you want to invalidate. In our scenario, we could use Contentful webhooks to be notified when a piece of content is updated or removed, and use a lambda to trigger a cache invalidation for that path.

Generating dynamic pages at build time

As of Next.JS 9.3 there is now a getStaticPaths function, which allows you to generate dynamic pages (that use placeholders i.e. /news/[article-uri] at build time. This can significantly reduce the need for SSR depending on your use case.

Initially, you had to generate all of these pages as part of your build, which could be quite inefficient (e.g. rebuilding a website that has thousands of blog articles every time a new blog is published). However, as of Next.JS 9.3 you can now generate static pages on demand as announced here using the fallback key on getStaticPaths

In our project, we could use Contentful WebHooks to trigger website builds, passing through the URI of the new page into the build pipeline to specify what part of the website to rebuild. If you have a page template for /news/* for example, you’d possibly have to trigger a rebuild of all news.

Doing this would negate a lot of the above, as for us we could build a lot of the website upfront, and then new blog articles could be built on demand when visitors accessed them. Next.js’ fallback functionality notifies you when a page is being built for the first time, allowing you to present an intermediary “page loading” screen for the first visitor who triggers the build, giving them visual feedback and keeping them engaged whilst the page builds behind the scenes.

Hopefully this overview gives you some understanding of the potential performance issues faced when using SSR with Next.js, and also the variety of options available to you when tuning your application.

More details of Next.js’ Server Side Rendering and Static Generation capabilities can be found here:

https://nextjs.org/blog/next-9-4

https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching

https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/pages