Every static site generator comparison opens with build times, and every one of them is measuring the thing that matters least. I took the same corpus, four hundred markdown files with frontmatter, images, tags and a couple of taxonomies, and pushed it through six generators to see what actually differed.

Build time differed by more than an order of magnitude. It changed nothing about which one I would pick.

The setup

Same content directory, copied six times. Same images, same frontmatter schema, same target output: a paginated index, per-post pages, tag archives, an RSS feed and a sitemap. Minimal theming, because theme complexity dominates build time in most generators and I wanted to compare the engines rather than my CSS.