[aws-lambda-nodejs] Bundling performance issues

❓ General Issue

The Question

In my stack I’ve created several lamdas using the new NodejsFunction from @aws-cdk/aws-lambda-nodejs. Functionally everything works fine, code in bundled with Parcel and the stack deploys without issues. There are however two (Parcel related?) performance issues:

1. Bundling seems quite slow, my lambda has a few dependencies and it takes about 20 seconds to bundle it.
2. When performing multiple tests for the same stack, tests are slow as the lambda bundling isn’t cached.

I’m wondering if this is the expected performance or if I’m missing something? I did some tests with webpack to manually bundle the Lambdas, this is about 3 times faster than webpack. I’m also wondering about the caching feature in Parcel, shouldn’t the second performance issue be tackled it?

How to reproduce

I’ve created a simple sample app to show the issue: https://github.com/jaapvanblaaderen/cdk-lambda-bundling-performance

The app contains a single stack with one lambda that’s referenced in two tests. In the test output you can observe that bundling an empty lambda function takes about 8 seconds (initially slow) and for the second test it’s still around 6-7 seconds (no/bad caching?).

Bundling asset simple-stack/HandlerLambda/Code/Stage...

 RUNS  lib/simple-stack.test.ts
✨ Built in 8.01s
Bundling asset simple-stack/HandlerLambda/Code/Stage...

 RUNS  lib/simple-stack.test.ts
✨ Built in 6.66s
 PASS  lib/simple-stack.test.ts (21.056 s)
  Simple Stack
    ✓ Should have memory size set to 512MB (9505 ms)
    ✓ Should use Node 12 as runtime (7459 ms)

Test Suites: 1 passed, 1 total
Tests:       2 passed, 2 total
Snapshots:   0 total
Time:        22.211 s
Ran all test suites.

Environment

• CDK CLI Version: 1.62
• Module Version: 1.62
• Node.js Version: v14.4.0
• OS: OSX Catalina
• Language (Version): TypeScript 4.0.2

[jogold]

@floydspace we are going to replace parcel with esbuild while still maintaining local bundling + fallback to Docker approach for the moment. People installing esbuild will have very fast bundling performances.

Let me first draft a PR for this then we can work on it together.

[floydspace]

Hey @jaapvanblaaderen . I have implemented a new cdk construct aws-lambda-nodejs-esbuild

See comparison results on my machine: @aws-cdk/aws-lambda-nodejs:

Bundling asset simple-stack/HandlerLambda/Code/Stage...

 RUNS  lib/simple-stack.test.ts
✨ Built in 11.88s

 PASS  lib/simple-stack.test.ts (84.678 s)s/_qq218h940s33jg73wss4k5w0000gn/T/cdk.outeeruBW/bundling-temp-dc2901b128dbc7ef10d25ae6a7a15a98d5e3ac81c654c3ad726474eee5ec  Simple Stack
    ✓ Should have memory size set to 512MB (13909 ms)
    ✓ Should use Node 12 as runtime (67285 ms)

Test Suites: 1 passed, 1 total
Tests:       2 passed, 2 total
Snapshots:   0 total
Time:        86.375 s, estimated 133 s
Ran all test suites.

vs aws-lambda-nodejs-esbuild:

 PASS  lib/simple-stack.test.ts
  Simple Stack
    ✓ Should have memory size set to 512MB (127 ms)
    ✓ Should use Node 12 as runtime (50 ms)

Test Suites: 1 passed, 1 total
Tests:       2 passed, 2 total
Snapshots:   0 total
Time:        2.045 s, estimated 4 s
Ran all test suites.

I forked your sample, so you can see how to migrate

Just saying.