Why eslint-plugin-import Takes 45 Seconds (And How We Fixed It)

Source: Dev.to

Your CI is slow. Your pre‑commit hooks timeout. Developers disable linting to ship faster.
The culprit? eslint-plugin-import.

Problem

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

That’s a 100× speed‑up.

// eslint-plugin-import resolves EVERY import from scratch
import { Button } from '@company/ui'; // Resolves entire package
// On every lint run. Every file. Every import.

import/no-cycle 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: out‑of‑memory errors on large monorepos.

Real GitHub issues

• “import/no-cycle takes 70 % of lint time” ( #2182 )
• “OOM checking circular dependencies”
• “Minutes to lint a monorepo”

Every lint run repeats the same work—no incremental analysis.

Solution

We rebuilt module resolution with a new plugin that adds caching and memoization.

Feature comparison

Migration steps

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, ~100× faster.

Benchmark

# With eslint-plugin-import
time npx eslint --no-cache .

# With eslint-plugin-import-next
time npx eslint --no-cache .

Get started

• 📦 npm: eslint-plugin-import-next
• ⭐ Star the project on GitHub and run the benchmark yourself.
• 🚀 If your CI is slow, drop a comment with your lint times!

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