Performance

About

Fumadocs MDX is a bundler plugin, in other words, it has a higher performance bottleneck. With bundlers like Webpack and Turbopack, it is enough for large docs sites with nearly 500+ MDX files, which is sufficient for almost all docs sites.

Advantages

Since Fumadocs MDX works with your bundler, you can import any files including client components in your MDX files. This allows a high flexibility and ensures everything is optimized by default.

Caveats

Although Fumadocs MDX can handle nearly 500+ files, you are recommended to use other alternatives when the amount of MDX files exceeds 400. A huge amount of MDX files can cause an extremely high memory usage during build and development mode.

This is because of:

Bundlers do a lot of work under the hood to bundle MDX and JavaScript files and optimize performance.
Bundlers are not supposed to compile hundreds of MDX files.

Alternative

A popular alternative is next-mdx-remote, it allows rendering pages on-demand with SSG which can highly increase your build speed. However, you cannot use import in MDX files anymore.

Remote Source

next-mdx-remote supports remote sources.

For a huge amount of files, we would also recommend using a remote source like GitHub. This allows you to fetch file content directly from your remote source and render it on-demand.

This is very important because without a remote source to hold your files, the content of these files will be a part of your build. Since host platforms like Vercel are not supposed to hold a huge build output, you might hit the limit of their plans.

Integration

Fumadocs doesn't provide an integration for next-mdx-remote, the main reason is next-mdx-remote supports remote sources, which are not necessarily file-system based. Fumadocs cannot generate a page tree for non file-system based sources.