Publish large maps with Webhelp vs multiple maps

[jdupont]

I try to publish a huge set of DITA content to webhelp.
I have one main map which refers to about 100 submaps and about 25000 topics.
If I generate a webhelp output from the main ditamap the process takes hours and generate a huge webhelp package (about 6GB).
I noticed that each html files from webhelp includes the full table of content which is big (about 200kb) so the TOC takes about 5GB in this publication.
I decided to minimize the amount of generated html files by using "chunk to-content" on my submaps which minimize the package size but increases the build time. On my recent dev laptop it takes about 10 hours.

Does anyone has a workaround or optimization for this?

If I generate a webhelp package per submap then the global process is faster but I lose some important features:

• we no longer have a global search
  we can no longer use the contextid mecanism as we don't know in what webhelp package our context (resourceid) is located

It would be great to have a kind of global index html page with unified search and contextid feature.