`ionic serve` performance - alternative to watch? [SOLVED]

Hello. I’m glad to use Ionic 2 for several projects already.

Using ionic serve is a great way to test on the fly, but my 13" MacBook Air is struggling to keep up whenever I save a file. The watch process makes my IDE freeze for up to several seconds every time it runs. I like to save a lot, not just whenever I need to test.

Has anyone else experienced the same problem?

Is there a way to run ionic serve without the watch process, and then maybe trigger watch manually?

Or maybe somehow get to the root of the problem, because I hardly see why 8 GB’s of memory and an Intel Core i5 should be saturated so easily. I never ever in any other work context experience a slowdown.

Thanks for your advice!

The problem was not the performance of ionic serve, or the underlying ionic build process.
I was stupid enough to have my IDE automatically index the build folder, thus having to crunch the huge compiled javascript file each time I would save any watched file.

Just exclude the www folder in your IDE.