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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-15T20:16:03+00:00

LESS compilation in my fresh Play 2 install is genuinely slow. Even after placing

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LESS compilation in my fresh Play 2 install is genuinely slow. Even after placing an ‘_’ on files that do not need direct compilation, a page refresh after a LESS edit takes ~8 seconds to complete. This is compared to a local compile using Codekit which takes less than a second.

Any suggestions on speeding up this process? Is it worth filing a bug against Play to have this looked at?

Here are details on my file sizes:
My LESS setup is very simple. _reset.less (.5k) _desktop.less (13k), _tablet.less (10k), _mobile.less (8k), _sprites.less (25k) files. An all.less (.3k) file that puts it all together. That’s it. The resulting css file is 53k.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I did a write-up of a small investigation into this problem. You can find it here.

    Bottom line: I get faster performance by switching to Sass. It’s not hard to do. Use the
    Play-Sass SBT plugin and, if you’re using Bootstrap, use the SASS Bootstrap files from the sass-twitter-bootstrap
    project.

    Precompiling your LESS files via the lessc command is another solution, and it’s quite fast.

    Assuming your project uses Bootstrap, using a precompiled Bootstrap, rather than the Bootstrap LESS files, is also a big win, because the Play LESS compiler recompiles all LESS files when one of them changes, and Bootstrap is rather large. But, for some of us, using a precompiled Bootstrap is inconvenient…

    Using Play 2.0’s Rhino-based, on-demand LESS compilation is the slowest option. Pig-slow, in fact. And ignore my comment about incrementalAssetsCompilation. It’s documented, but it does not appear to be in the 2.0.x code base.

    EDIT (22 May, 2013) Jonathan Parsons has put together a play-lessc plugin that uses the lessc command to compile LESS files. It can dramatically decrease LESS compilation times in a Play project. See https://github.com/jmparsons/play-lessc

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