Post-Mortem: Why ESLint Performance Failed (And the 100x Fix)

Developer velocity dies when CI takes 45 seconds to lint. Here is the technical post-mortem of why traditional linting failed, and how we engineered a 100x speedup into the static analysis ecosystem.

Your CI is slow. Your pre-commit hooks timeout. Developers disable linting to ship faster.

The culprit? eslint-plugin-import.

The Performance Gap

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Linting 10,000 files                                │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│ eslint-plugin-import:      45.0s  ███████████████████│
│ eslint-plugin-import-next:  0.4s  ▏                  │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

That's 100x faster. Not a typo.

Why Is It So Slow?

1. Cold Module Resolution

// eslint-plugin-import resolves EVERY import from scratch
import { Button } from '@company/ui'; // Resolves entire package

// On every lint run. Every file. Every import.

2. The no-cycle Problem

{% details Click to see why no-cycle is a performance killer %}

The import/no-cycle rule builds a complete dependency graph.

For N files with M imports each:

• Time complexity: O(N × M²)
• Memory: Entire graph in RAM
• Result: OOM on large monorepos

# Real GitHub issues:
# "import/no-cycle takes 70% of lint time" (#2182)
# "OOM checking circular dependencies"
# "Minutes to lint a monorepo"

{% enddetails %}

3. No Caching

Every lint run repeats the same work. No incremental analysis.

The Solution

We rebuilt module resolution with:

Quick Migration

npm uninstall eslint-plugin-import
npm install --save-dev eslint-plugin-import-next

// eslint.config.js
import importNext from 'eslint-plugin-import-next';

export default [importNext.configs.recommended];

That's it. Same rules, 100x faster.

Benchmark It Yourself

# Compare on your own codebase
time npx eslint --no-cache . # With eslint-plugin-import
time npx eslint --no-cache . # With eslint-plugin-import-next

📦 npm: eslint-plugin-import-next 📖 Migration Guide

The Interlace ESLint Ecosystem Interlace is a high-fidelity suite of static code analyzers designed to automate security, performance, and reliability for the modern Node.js stack. With over 330 rules across 18 specialized plugins, it provides 100% coverage for OWASP Top 10, LLM Security, and Database Hardening.

Explore the full Documentation

© 2026 Ofri Peretz. All rights reserved.

Build Securely. I'm Ofri Peretz, a Security Engineering Leader and the architect of the Interlace Ecosystem. I build static analysis standards that automate security and performance for Node.js fleets at scale.

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