Vinext 1.4 cuts server work and speeds up hydration

Vinext 1.4 reduces work across several rendering stages: App Router layouts run once per request, prefetching dynamic routes no longer renders the entire page, and the chunks needed for hydration can compile in the background in recent Chrome. On the Hacker News benchmark, the author reports 31.1 ms of CPU per request, versus 54.4 ms in 1.3 and 33.7 ms for Next.js.

The release also keeps cached HTML and RSC payload generation in sync. Results still depend on the workload: on a content-site prototype, Next.js paints sooner and uses less CPU per request. A TanStack Redact test shows another trade-off: less JavaScript to download, but substantially more expensive hydration on content-heavy pages.