Hi HN, author here. I set out to do a casual comparison of deploy speeds between Reflame and other popular services, not expecting a whole lot of differences between the others (since most of them were just spinning up VMs/Containers and running the same CLI tools).
I ended up finding out that Netlify had some _really_ long queuing times that made it 50s+ slower than it needed to be (and made it fall wayyy behind the others). This queuing was fairly consistent on weekdays, and I've tested dozens of times over the past few weeks with similar results.
Until they do something about this I'd recommend looking into one of the others tested here if you care about deployment speed: i.e. Vercel if you want something popular and works as a drop in replacement, Reflame if you want to never wait for a deploy ever again, even for a second, and don't mind doing putting in some upfront work (I'll be around to help you through the process ofc). :)
1) Part of the issue here is my Netlify account having branch builds enabled, which resulted in two builds running for every commit. This resulted in longer queue times with a concurrency level of 1, which would explain about ~20s of the queuing time seen here to run a branch build of similar length.
2) The other part is Netlify's previews run on PR creation, not on every commit like on all the other services tested here. This explains another ~5s of delay between creating the branch and opening the PR.
That unfortunately still leaves ~30s of the total ~55s of queuing time above unaccounted for. Initial tests with branch builds turned off show results that are much more competitive, but it was performed on 4AM on a Sunday, so I can't conclusively rule out additional queuing delays during busier hours yet. Will be investigating further during PDT business hours. Stay tuned for another update!
I ended up finding out that Netlify had some _really_ long queuing times that made it 50s+ slower than it needed to be (and made it fall wayyy behind the others). This queuing was fairly consistent on weekdays, and I've tested dozens of times over the past few weeks with similar results.
Until they do something about this I'd recommend looking into one of the others tested here if you care about deployment speed: i.e. Vercel if you want something popular and works as a drop in replacement, Reflame if you want to never wait for a deploy ever again, even for a second, and don't mind doing putting in some upfront work (I'll be around to help you through the process ofc). :)
I also made a Twitter thread here if you want an abridged version: https://twitter.com/lewisl9029/status/1591530406909997056