Resource Usage and Optimization Opportunities in Workflows of GitHub Actions.
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| Title: | Resource Usage and Optimization Opportunities in Workflows of GitHub Actions. |
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| Authors: | Bouzenia, Islem1 fi_bouzenia@esi.dz, Pradel, Michael1 michael@binaervarianz.de |
| Source: | ICSE: International Conference on Software Engineering. 2024, p1-12. 12p. |
| Subjects: | Workflow, Github Inc., Computer software, Computer software development, Computer security |
| Abstract: | Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) has become a prevalent practice in software development. GitHub Actions is emerging as a popular platform for implementing CI/CD pipelines, called workflows, especially because the platform offers 2,000 minutes of computation for free to public repositories each month. To understand what these resources are used for and whether CI/CD could be more efficient, this paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study of resource usage and optimization opportunities of GitHub Action workflows. Our findings show that CI/CD imposes significant costs, e.g., $504 per year for an average paid-tier repository. The majority of the used resources is consumed by testing and building (91.2%), which is triggered by pull requests (50.7%), pushes (30.9%), and regularly scheduled workflows (15.5%). While existing optimizations, such as caching (adopted by 32.9% of paid-tier repositories), demonstrate a positive impact, they overall remain underutilized. This result underscores the need for enhanced documentation and tools to guide developers toward more resource-efficient workflows. Moreover, we show that relatively simple changes in the platform, such as deactivating scheduled workflows when repositories are inactive, could result in reductions of execution time between 1.1% and 31.6% over the impacted workflows. Overall, we envision our findings to help improve the resource efficiency of CI/CD pipelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| Database: | Engineering Source |
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| Abstract: | Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) has become a prevalent practice in software development. GitHub Actions is emerging as a popular platform for implementing CI/CD pipelines, called workflows, especially because the platform offers 2,000 minutes of computation for free to public repositories each month. To understand what these resources are used for and whether CI/CD could be more efficient, this paper presents the first comprehensive empirical study of resource usage and optimization opportunities of GitHub Action workflows. Our findings show that CI/CD imposes significant costs, e.g., $504 per year for an average paid-tier repository. The majority of the used resources is consumed by testing and building (91.2%), which is triggered by pull requests (50.7%), pushes (30.9%), and regularly scheduled workflows (15.5%). While existing optimizations, such as caching (adopted by 32.9% of paid-tier repositories), demonstrate a positive impact, they overall remain underutilized. This result underscores the need for enhanced documentation and tools to guide developers toward more resource-efficient workflows. Moreover, we show that relatively simple changes in the platform, such as deactivating scheduled workflows when repositories are inactive, could result in reductions of execution time between 1.1% and 31.6% over the impacted workflows. Overall, we envision our findings to help improve the resource efficiency of CI/CD pipelines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
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| DOI: | 10.1145/3597503.3623303 |
