Mkdocs build is very slow (jupyter notebooks re-rendering even when no changes)

[mfisher87]

Mkdocs currently lacks caching features we would need to fix this: https://github.com/danielfrg/mkdocs-jupyter/issues/161

[betolink]

This would be nice indeed! maybe we can contribute upstream? Just a note that this is mostly for when we are working on a single notebook, for the whole documentation I think we can pass --dirtyreload to mkdocs to avoid re-executing the whole site. https://github.com/mkdocs/mkdocs/issues/1074

[mfisher87]

Readthedocs builds still wouldn't benefit, right?

I feel like upstreaming something like Quarto's "freeze" feature might not be too heavy a lift. Our builds right now are pretty wasteful, and it would be the right thing to do.

[betolink]

Correct, I don't think readthedocs has a partial build workflow, the hope is that if context is persisted between builds maybe jupyter-cache can speed things up.