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Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

warpbuild.com

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Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#21

Post by suryao »

btown wrote: post #13

Congrats on the launch! There do seem to be a number of other entrants in this space: https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners#li... What makes you stand out from the pack? The VM approach seems very cool - is this unique in the space? Do you have different approaches that provide speedups or security benefits not possible with other third party runner systems? Any benchmarks against competitors? Sep…

VMs are a necessity if you are serious about security and isolation guarantees. I'd hope everyone else also uses it.

I haven't run benchmarks but this comment provides a glimpse - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38571518

VM startup speed has many levels to it. Right now, we are doing the inefficient job of having a pool though we have some items in the roadmap to fix this better.

In terms of speed up, we are doing things differently. For instance, we are baking in container layer caching natively so that users can benefit. This leads to speed ups of 2-10x depending on how the dockerfile is structured for caching.

This is just the first step - we have a very exciting roadmap :-)

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#22

Post by joshstrange »

macOS support will be a big deal. GitHub's macOS runners are straight trash. They are painfully slow and horribly expensive. In same cases I've wondered if it made sense to build part of my project on linux then build the last bit on macOS since macOS minutes are 10x as expensive _and_ the same operation is noticeably slower. In the end the savings weren't worth the complexity and development time. That said, GitHub should be ashamed of how bad their macOS runners are.

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#23

Post by suryao »

joshstrange wrote: post #22

macOS support will be a big deal. GitHub's macOS runners are straight trash. They are painfully slow and horribly expensive. In same cases I've wondered if it made sense to build part of my project on linux then build the last bit on macOS since macOS minutes are 10x as expensive _and_ the same operation is noticeably slower. In the end the savings weren't worth the complexity and development time. That said, GitHub…

Absolutely! We're working on it

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#24

Post by niels_bom »

Would you still have a viable product if GitHub decides to performance-optimize their action runners?

I get that performance is important, and if MS puts their weight behind it I can see them fixing their stuff and basically removing the market for 3rd party solutions.

Or is this maybe a “hey MS buy us?” thing?

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#25

Post by suryao »

niels_bom wrote: post #24

Would you still have a viable product if GitHub decides to performance-optimize their action runners? I get that performance is important, and if MS puts their weight behind it I can see them fixing their stuff and basically removing the market for 3rd party solutions. Or is this maybe a “hey MS buy us?” thing?

There is a performance - cost envelope that we are pushing, which I believe github will be hard pressed to match.

Also, this is the first step in our broader objective to: (a) support all CI providers (b) provide ecosystem support and tooling for efficient build engineering. The latter is in the form of additional tools, recommendations to be incorporated into workflow design, build insights etc. We are just getting started.

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#26

Post by shepherdjerred »

Sytten wrote: post #18

We are currently on Buildjet and it has made significant difference for our rust builds. But I would change in a heartbeat for Windows and even more for MacOS support. Mind you only if it is per minute pricing. The GitHub Actions macos machines are sooo bad that anything else at this point I will take.

What do you need macOS for? Have you considered cross-compilation?

Zig + Rust allows cross-compilation for Rust: https://actually.fyi/posts/zig-makes-rust-cross-compilation-...

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#27

Post by tbarbugli »

First attempt feedback: onboarding is amazing, I love how easy it is to create a PR with the VM.

- Github actions are faster for us (~30% faster)

- Some of our tests failed while waiting for a dockerized server to be up

- It takes several minutes before all jobs are running (I have a pipeline with 6 parallel jobs, a few started with 2 minutes delay).

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#28

Post by suryao »

tbarbugli wrote: post #27

First attempt feedback: onboarding is amazing, I love how easy it is to create a PR with the VM. - Github actions are faster for us (~30% faster) - Some of our tests failed while waiting for a dockerized server to be up - It takes several minutes before all jobs are running (I have a pipeline with 6 parallel jobs, a few started with 2 minutes delay).

Thanks for the feedback!

We are currently seeing fairly heavy load. The hn hug of death is real. Tweaked some settings and the startup delays should be back to the sub-10 second range in a few minutes.

Re: Show HN: WarpBuild – x86-64 and arm GitHub Action runners for 30% faster builds

#29

Post by tbarbugli »

suryao wrote: post #28
tbarbugli wrote: post #27

First attempt feedback: onboarding is amazing, I love how easy it is to create a PR with the VM. - Github actions are faster for us (~30% faster) - Some of our tests failed while waiting for a dockerized server to be up - It takes several minutes before all jobs are running (I have a pipeline with 6 parallel jobs, a few started with 2 minutes delay).

Thanks for the feedback! We are currently seeing fairly heavy load. The hn hug of death is real. Tweaked some settings and the startup delays should be back to the sub-10 second range in a few minutes.

I suspected that :) Where do you guys host the servers that run Github actions? (startup time is better now but speed is still much worse than Github)
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