Offline documentation too large

[AtlanticClaire]

When building an offline version of our documentation, I realized that it is very large (12 GB and larger). Such a size is a showstopper because our users do not accept such large offline offline documentation.

The main reason for the size is that the navigation structure is part of every page, which is a systemic problem of static site generators. Pruning is only of limited help because we have a flat navigation structure and for efficient pruning a deeper tree structure would be necessary, i.e. even with pruning the resulting size is still too large.

Has anyone had similar experiences? If so, how did you solve the problem?

Many thanks in advance for sharing your experiences!

[kamilkrzyskow]

Hello @AtlanticClaire,
have you considered removing the navigation altogether and defining only a single index page containing the whole file structure tree?
https://github.com/oprypin/mkdocs-literate-nav

To expand on the previous idea, maybe there's an option to use an iframe pointing to a file which contains the navigation tree and using JavaScript to synchronize what entry is highlighted.

Also how many files are we talking about? 12GB at lets say 2MB per HTML file is ~6000 pages. With such a number I would reconsider if every user needs the same offline documentation or if it can be be split up into submodules for categories. Similarly to how navigation.tabs separates the navigation for you, but you could also have your own layer of categorization.

I'm assuming the 12GB is raw data, how much is it zipped? Are you using a minification plugin?
At Nype we're using this minify plugin with adjusted settings.

I doubt that there is a good general approach for this, and will likely require something custom catered to the target audience.

[AtlanticClaire]

Hello @kamilkrzyskow , thank you very much for your detailed and helpful answer! 🙂

I will definitely have a look at the plugin https://github.com/oprypin/mkdocs-literate-nav together with your idea of using an iframe plus JavaScript and give you feedback here.

At the moment the project contains about 6600 files and splitting is unfortunately not possible because the users need the entire documentation. But later there will be a lot more files (70,000+), which is why finding a solution early is very important to me.

And yes, you're right, 12 GB is raw data, the zipped version is around 800 MB.

I'm not currently using a minification plugin, but I'll have a look at the one you linked (https://github.com/monosans/mkdocs-minify-html-plugin) and let you know how it goes 👍