perf(navigation): skip unused leaf sibling searches

[onmax]

🔗 Linked issue

No linked issue or discussion. Reproduction below.

❓ Type of change

• 📖 Documentation (updates to the documentation or readme)
• 🐞 Bug fix (a non-breaking change that fixes an issue)
• 👌 Enhancement (improving an existing functionality like performance)
• ✨ New feature (a non-breaking change that adds functionality)
• ⚠️ Breaking change (fix or feature that would cause existing functionality to change)

📚 Description

Navigation scanned earlier siblings when adding leaf pages. Skip the unused root lookup and check only newly appended children for placeholders. Once an array contains a placeholder, keep the original lookup and merge behavior.

 ordinary root page
- search siblings, discard the result
nested leaf page
- search all earlier siblings+ skip lookup while no placeholders exist

For 5,000 pages, the pinned fixtures count these find predicate calls:

Pages	Before	After	Repro
Flat root pages	12,497,500	0	Before · After
Pages under /guide	12,502,499	4,999	Before · After

Index merging and caller order stay unchanged. Parent lookups and child arrays that have contained placeholders retain their existing cost.

Navigation generation time for the exact PR base and head, on Node 24.19.0 / Linux / AMD EPYC 7452. Medians of 25 samples after five warmups, alternating before and after. Brackets show the middle 50% of samples.

Layout	Pages	Before, ms	After, ms
Flat root pages	1,000	18.9 [13.7, 25.3]	4.5 [2.9, 6.4]
Flat root pages	5,000	457.0 [360.7, 635.5]	25.5 [22.2, 30.9]
Under /guide	1,000	31.8 [23.2, 37.0]	10.8 [7.6, 14.5]
Under /guide	5,000	540.7 [457.5, 634.2]	40.5 [33.7, 47.0]

Both versions produce equal trees for each input. Timings exclude SQL, input cloning, and setup. This shared machine has variable load; these are local navigation timings, not page-load measurements. Benchmark script, command, and raw samples.

Copy and run both comparisons with Node 24.19.0 and Corepack

forreproin nuxt-content-navigation-scan nuxt-content-nested-navigation;do
(
set -e
git clone --depth 1 --filter=blob:none --sparse --branch "repro/$repro" https://github.com/onmax/repros.git "$repro-repro"cd"$repro-repro"
git sparse-checkout set"$repro""$repro-fix"cd"$repro"
corepack pnpm install --frozen-lockfile --ignore-scripts
corepack pnpm verify
cd"../$repro-fix"
corepack pnpm install --frozen-lockfile --ignore-scripts
corepack pnpm verify
) ||exit 1
done

📝 Checklist

• I have linked an issue or discussion.
• I have updated the documentation accordingly.

Documentation: not applicable; public navigation behavior is unchanged.

[vercel]

@onmax is attempting to deploy a commit to the Nuxt Team on Vercel.

A member of the Team first needs to authorize it.

[coderabbitai]

No actionable comments were generated in the recent review. 🎉

ℹ️ Recent review info

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: Organization UI

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Team

Run ID: d198ddcd-9426-4a86-a862-c51092ddf6c4

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between dd8c61f and d999720.

📒 Files selected for processing (2)

• src/runtime/internal/navigation.ts
• test/unit/generateNavigationTree.test.ts

Included review availability: Your plan provides up to 8 included reviews per hour; 7 remain after this review.

---

📝 Walkthrough

Walkthrough

generateNavigationTree now performs duplicate-link lookup only for index content. Ordinary first-level pages are appended directly. A unit test covers 100 ordinary root pages, verifies the generated tree, and confirms that no sibling searches occur.

Estimated code review effort: 2 (Simple) | ~10 minutes

Merge Risk:⚪ Minimal · up to d9997

Navigation generation avoids unused root-page sibling searches while preserving index merging, placeholder behavior, and navigation ordering. No current merge-blocking risk remains.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 5

✅ Passed checks (5 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Docstring Coverage	✅ Passed	Docstring coverage is 100.00% which is sufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 2 functions across 2 files.
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly summarizes the main performance change: skipping unnecessary leaf sibling searches during navigation generation.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description directly explains the navigation performance enhancement, its behavior, benchmark results, and test coverage.

✨ Finishing Touches 💡 1

🛠️ Fix failing CI checks 💡

• Create stacked PR
• Commit on current branch

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests

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[pkg-pr-new]

npm i https://pkg.pr.new/@nuxt/content@3845

commit: d999720