Description
For the pandas docs, we currenlty pin sphinx to 1.5.x because we previously had problems with 1.6. I was now investigating what the problem exactly is preventing us to upgrade (pandas-dev/pandas#16705), and the main problem is a considerable slowdown in the writing phase.
Problem
Building the pandas docs went from ca 20 min to > 50 min, when switching from sphinx 1.5.6 to 1.6.5.
It is especially our api pages (autodoc pages for methods/attributes generated by autosummary) that are very slow in writing. In the progress output I can clearly see that each generated docstring page takes a noticeble 0.5 à 1.5 seconds to write (and since we have many of those pages (> 1000), this takes a long time)
Procedure to reproduce the problem
Building the pandas docs, although this is not a small reproducible step.
Does anybody have an idea where to start looking or how to best debug this?
Environment info
- OS: Linux (Ubuntu 16.04)
- Python version: 3.6
- Sphinx version: 1.6.5