Compass sprites regenerating on every scss file save - taking 2 minutes to compile every time I save at the moment.

WW 3.2.915.22691 VS Pro 2012 11.0.60315.01 Update 2

Every time I save one of my scss files the compass sprites,containing 85 individual images, regenerate rather than checking to see if any of the individual images have changed. This makes saving sass extremely slow (like 2 minutes - no exaggeration).

I have checked this with the compass watch command line and don't have the same issue.

A bit more information. My task is to switch our mobile site over to using compass sprites. There are 85 sprites plus a second retina set... So 170 in total.

Everything was going pretty well with this task. I was able to generate the sprite map successfully and was pretty chuffed when I replaced one of the old sprites. As I said, everything was going pretty well.

After replacing 3 or 4 more sprites I noticed that compiling was taking a little longer. It wasn’t until the 10th sprite that I realised the time to compile was increasing exponentially. By the 14th sprite the compile time was 2 minutes (no exaggeration).

At this point it appears that Web Workbench is regenerating the entire sprite map from scratch, for every single sprite, every time you save a scss file (even ones that don’t have anything to do with sprites). I've watched this happen in windows explorer. The generated sprite images go from 0kb to 65kb over and over again for 2 minutes.

The ‘compass watch’ command-line tool, which works correctly, looks in the sprite folders and checks for changes before deciding whether to regenerate sprite images. Compass watch takes less than a second to compile…

Thanks for reporting this, I suspect this is a side effect of us having to call out to compile each time we save which leads to re-generation so I will be investigating if we can improve this during this week. Ill report back once I have had more of a look into this.

Jeremy

Hi Jeremy, Any update on this?

Murray

Nothing yet. This is still on our backlog and Ill update the thread once we have made some progress here.

Jeremy

This is a great product, but its sad that there isn't any solution to this bug.

So here's the alternative

Uninstall webworkbench

Install ruby via http://rubyinstaller.org/

Open Start Command Prompt with Ruby

Then

gem install compass

cd to the directory where the your config.rb file is

Then

compass watch

For coffeescript

install nodejs http://nodejs.org/download/

Open nodejs command prompt

Then

npm install -g coffee-script

Then to compile your script

coffee -c /path/to/script.coffee

coffee won't watch your files/folders like compass so you could probably slap together a command line program to execute the sys command.

Hope this speeds up your development, it certainly has for me.

Apologies for the wait.

In the next nightly build, a new option will be available to avoid the sprite performance issue. In VS, go to Tools->Options->Web Workbench. In the Compass category, set "Force Compass recompile" to false. This will stop Compass from rebuilding all the sprites every time a scss file is saved, unless of course a sprite needs to be rebuilt.

The next nightly build will be available at around 1200 GMT and will be downloadable from your account page if you have the Pro edition: http://www.mindscapehq.com/store/myaccount

Jason Fauchelle

Unfortunately my license expired last week and I am not willing to pay for the Pro edition just to verify that the bug is fixed. My team and I have since moved to an alternate approach to dealing with Compass in Visual Studio. We're unlikely to switch back.