Slowing down to speed up

When I got the recent website redesign working and was able to finally get it deployed live, I had been working on the serverside of my new publishing tool for a while, and the static site renderer had been ticking along very nicely without any real issues. However when I switched back to the rendering and finally tried to build my whole website, with over 10 years worth of content, I had a bit of an unpleasant surprise. The old system was consistently taking about 4-5 minutes to build and deploy, but the new system when I first ran it, took 45 minutes just to do the render. And in fact things would get even worse before they got better. I later discovered that the Github Actions runner had started failing with out of space issues. When I looked into it and ran the build locally it was taking up about 15GB of space. I undid the change I ahad just made and got it back down to 5GB, and the deploy started completing again, but it was clear I had both render time issues and space…