Comment by mmoustafa

2 days ago

I don't think 0.38s is a bad trade-off for convenience when the rest of the tools I need to do my job collectively are another 2s at shell startup. NVM alone adds 0.5-0.6s on my M4 Macbook Air.

Bigger fish to fry if we're being practical.

11 comments

mmoustafa

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2muchcoffeeman  2 days ago

I am seeing a phenomenon of people wanting to hyper optimise their workflows. It’s nonsensical when you consider the other stuff you need to do or how slow everything else is.

prodigycorp  2 days ago

Holy heck, I just profiled my zsh initialization and nvm was the big source of bloat, holy hell. Similar setup as you (M4 MBP), same amount of startup bloat. Lazy loading it fixes it.

GPT-5.2 changed the nvm initialization script to:

  export NVM_DIR="$HOME/.nvm"
  
  _nvm_lazy_load() {
  unset -f nvm node npm npx _nvm_lazy_load
  [ -s "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh" ] && . "$NVM_DIR/nvm.sh"
  }
  
  nvm() { _nvm_lazy_load; nvm "$@"; }
  node() { _nvm_lazy_load; command node "$@"; }
  npm() { _nvm_lazy_load; command npm "$@"; }
  npx() { _nvm_lazy_load; command npx "$@"; }

  • maxkfranz  20 hours ago

    That's why I switched to Mise (https://mise.jdx.dev). Having new terminal sessions taking up hundreds of milliseconds because of nvm isn't the end of the world, but it's annoying when you're in the middle of something.

    Mise reads in your .nvmrc files so you don't have to configure anything new.

  • mmoustafa  2 days ago

    Although this is what Opus recommends, it will give you many issues as you don’t really have any node runtimes in the path (or worse if you do).

    What I recommend is replacing it with $PATH=(a command to find the nvm default alias directory, detect the verion and load it from that specific version directory directly) so you always have default node in path and then lazy loading only nvm itself, so you can switch when you need to.

    Sorry I don’t have the command handy as I’m on mobile but if you paste the above into Opus you’ll get it.

    • prodigycorp  2 days ago

      Thanks. I modified my comment to disclose that gpt 5.2 generated that modification. I'll try your suggestion.

PunchyHamster  2 days ago

..have you checked. It's 0.04s in my setup. I have it a bit customized but I don't remember chasing milliseconds on config