The MarkdownFormat plugin recursively searches all directories for *.md files during Registration (in the Register() method).

We have some web applications, where we have thousands of (sub-)directories, e.g. in a data folder. This means, that the Register() method may take up to 60 seconds to scan for *.md files, thus slowing down the application startup.
We have one customer who reported a startup-delay of several minutes.

As far as I have seen (using ServiceStack 3.9.71), there is no way to restrict the folders being searched by the MarkdownFormat plugin.

In our case, the workaround was to simply disable the Markdown-Feature (since we are not using it).

But would it be possible to somehow optimize the process of finding markdown-templates? E.g:

• allow to exclude certain folders ("~/data" in our case)
• allow to exclude junctions (in our case, ~/data is a junction, pointing to an external directory, to prevent IIS from monitoring it)
• search for templates on-demand (not during startup)
• ...