Hey! Sorry to hear about this — the core of the problem you’re facing I expect is that build tooling struggles very much with large CSS files, so no matter how fast you can generate the CSS, if it’s like 8mb because you have a rich config file and you’re in development so you’re not purging, the overall build is going to be slow. We’ve tested this a bunch by feeding static CSS files of this size into webpack without having Tailwind in the build process at all.

The JIT engine is our solution to this, and ensures the CSS file is never large so it never causes these issues. We have done a ton of work to iron out bugs in the new engine between 2.1 and 2.2 so I would definitely give it a shot and see how it goes.

Consider even using our new CLI tool to compile your CSS instead of integrating it into your Ember build step — on the biggest project we’ve tried (over 400 template files, some thousands of lines long), the new CLI compiles the CSS in about 400ms, and incremental rebuilds when you save a template file take 3–10ms.