Our CI/CD Pipeline Took 24 Minutes. These 7 GitHub Actions Fixes Got It Under 7.

No new tools and no bigger runners. Just YAML changes you can copy into your repo today.

From 24 minutes to 6.5: seven GitHub Actions changes, no bigger runners. Image by the author.

Here’s a habit I didn’t notice until it was everywhere on our team.

Someone pushes a commit. They open Slack. Then Reddit. Then they make coffee. Twenty-four minutes later the pipeline goes red because of a missing semicolon in a test file, and by then they’ve completely lost the thread of what they were doing.

That was us. A pretty normal Node.js API, a React frontend, a Docker image, and a GitHub Actions pipeline that had grown one “quick addition” at a time until nobody wanted to touch it.

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The usual answer to slow CI is “throw bigger runners at it.” We didn’t have the budget for that, and honestly, I don’t think it would have helped much. Bigger runners make slow work go a little faster. They don’t stop you from doing work you don’t need to do.

So I spent two afternoons on it. Here’s every change that made a real difference, in the order I’d do them again, with the YAML.

First, measure. Don’t guess.