A team successfully reduced their Quarkus CI pipeline time on GitHub Actions from 9-11 minutes to just over 5 minutes. They achieved this by optimizing duplicate Quarkus work, not by using larger or more expensive runners.
Hey WondTech readers! We’ve got some cool news for anyone dealing with CI/CD pipelines, especially if you’re into Quarkus. A team recently managed to slash their continuous integration (CI) build times on GitHub Actions by half, taking their pipelines from around 9-11 minutes down to just 5 minutes 20 seconds. And get this: they did it without needing bigger, more expensive runners or any paid caching services!
What does this mean for you? Well, it’s a brilliant example of how smart optimization can make a huge difference, saving time and resources without hitting your budget. If your own build times feel sluggish, this story proves that a deeper look at your existing setup can uncover big wins.
The secret wasn't making Maven compile faster or speeding up dependency downloads, which were already optimized. Instead, they discovered that the bottleneck was due to duplicated Quarkus tasks. Their pipeline was repeatedly performing 'augmentation' and 'application boots' for various test suites, even when those specific tests didn’t actually require a full Quarkus startup or the same infrastructure.
Their monorepo, a multi-module Quarkus project with around 24,000 lines of code, was big enough for these repeated Quarkus starts to really slow things down. By carefully identifying and eliminating this redundant work, they dramatically improved efficiency. They already had several common optimizations in place, like parallel Maven execution, a Maven build cache, and parallel test configurations. This meant they had to dig deeper than the usual suspects.
This news is a fantastic reminder that sometimes the biggest gains come from understanding the unique demands of your application and refining the workflow itself, rather than just scaling up hardware. It’s all about working smarter, not just harder, in your CI environment!
What does this mean for you? Well, it’s a brilliant example of how smart optimization can make a huge difference, saving time and resources without hitting your budget. If your own build times feel sluggish, this story proves that a deeper look at your existing setup can uncover big wins.
The secret wasn't making Maven compile faster or speeding up dependency downloads, which were already optimized. Instead, they discovered that the bottleneck was due to duplicated Quarkus tasks. Their pipeline was repeatedly performing 'augmentation' and 'application boots' for various test suites, even when those specific tests didn’t actually require a full Quarkus startup or the same infrastructure.
Their monorepo, a multi-module Quarkus project with around 24,000 lines of code, was big enough for these repeated Quarkus starts to really slow things down. By carefully identifying and eliminating this redundant work, they dramatically improved efficiency. They already had several common optimizations in place, like parallel Maven execution, a Maven build cache, and parallel test configurations. This meant they had to dig deeper than the usual suspects.
This news is a fantastic reminder that sometimes the biggest gains come from understanding the unique demands of your application and refining the workflow itself, rather than just scaling up hardware. It’s all about working smarter, not just harder, in your CI environment!
