Get the latest tech news

Reverse engineering the GHA cache to improve performance (2024)

Here's how Depot reverse-engineered the GitHub Actions cache and built our own GitHub Actions Runners to achieve a 10x improvement in cache speed.

Another issue that alternative GitHub Actions runner providers can introduce is latency and reduced bandwidth due to having the compute located in European data centers such as Hetzner. We believe this is the right combination to get the best performance and access the best compute options, as well as to maximize bandwidth and minimize latency for anything our customers might need to do in AWS as part of their CI builds. While a faster cache helps to improve the overall build performance, we also needed to figure out how to make runners available on demand with the right configuration without spending a crazy amount of money running instances 24/7.

Get the Android app