Spike - Performance Investigation

[kmcfaul]

Investigate and come up with purpose solution for performance issues we are currently seeing with Astro. Performance issues are around page and tab transitions. There are also issues that were found when doing tab navigation:

Possible solutions include:

• Server side rendering for react islands and custom view transitions. #165
• Using an alternative router for the navigation portion of Astro (https://logsnag.com/blog/react-spa-with-astro)
• Updating the legacy home grown framework
• Instead of using react components use Astro only for the page components and tabs

By the end of this spike we should have a solution with a PoC demonstrating the performance improvements if we are continuing to use Astro. Otherwise we should have a plan in place with how we should update our existing home grown framework to modernize it reducing the pain points and allow the team to upgrade the current dependencies.

[dlabaj]

From @kmcfaul in issue #146

"There are performance issues again on the astro site in org after pulling in react & core repos. I'm unsure if the sidebar is still (even if partially) the culprit as the passed structure is still large, or if it is because most pages can't be static due to the live examples, or if its just a dev server issue.

The current flow I'm seeing is upon clicking a tab or page link:

Some time will pass (feels about a second or two)
The page will refresh with only the bare skeleton
The sidebar and masthead will rerender, and the page content static content will render
The masthead actions (theme switcher) will render
The page content / examples will render last
"

[dlabaj]

Investigated the use of Rust based Webpack implementation called RSPack for the legacy documentation framework. This increased current documentation framework performance by up to 66% improvement. A PR for this change is available, we should merge this now to at minimum increase our current framework performance.