alt Hacker News> i am trying hard to convince more people to rack themselves especially for CI actions.
What do you think the typical duty cycle is for a CI machine?
Raw performance is kind of meaningless if you aren't actually using the hardware. It's a lot of up front capex just to prove a point on a single metric.
Raw performance, in the sense of single core performance, is still one of the most important factors for us. Yes, we have parallelised tests, in different modules, etc. But there are still many single threaded operations in the build server. Also, especially in the cloud, IO is a bottleneck you can almost only get around by provisioning a bigger CPU.
Our CI run smaller PR checks during the day when devs make changes. In the “downtime” we run longer/more complex tests such as resilience and performance tests. So typically a machine is utilised 20-22/7.