markdown-it: some sort of clash between katex and webpack-dev-server

I’m using Vuepress (a static site generator) to parse markdown to html.

It uses markdown-it for markdown parsing. When I try to use plugins for katex, some sort of issue arises which causes the webpack-dev-server to launch incredibly slowly, as in around 30+ minutes.

Here is a minimal example repo markdown-katex-debug.

The same issue doesn’t happen with production builds (also via webpack).

I’ve tried various katex flavoured plugins, and they all seem to cause the same behaviour: markdown-it-texmath @iktakahiro/markdown-it-katex @neilsustc/markdown-it-katex @mathssyfy/markdown-it-katex

(Note, the original markdown-it-katex is no longer maintained, hence the proliferation of forks…)

Any ideas on what the source of the issues might be and how, in general, markdown-it implementations might proceed so as not to clash with webpack-dev-server / vuepress?

[kevinbarabash]

Wow, that’s really slow. 😞 It is mostly like an issue with the plugin itself and not with katex itself as katex is pretty fast at rendering things. I suggest opening tickets against the plugin repos, they should be able to better determine what the issue is. 🤞

[songololo]

@kevinbarabash it was quite slow, I seem to recall in the region of 30m.