Download speed on self-hosted runners is significantly slower

👋🏼

We’ve started working with self-hosted runners, but noticed that the download speed when downloading the cache is significantly slower than on hosted runners. Here’s the breakdown of what is happening:

• Self-hosted runner version: 2.296.2
• Cache size: ~300MB
• Average download speed
  • Hosted runners: 50 MBs/s
  • Self-hosted runners: 3.5 MBs/s

Hosted:

Self-hosted:

Workflow:

      - name: Cache yarn dependencies
        uses: actions/cache@v3
        id: cache-dependencies
        with:
          path: node_modules
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-${{ hashFiles('**/yarn.lock') }}
          restore-keys: |
            ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-

      - name: Install dependencies
        if: steps.cache-dependencies.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
        run: |
          yarn install --frozen-lockfile

I’m pretty confident there’s no limitation on our machine, and I’m not sure if this is a limitation on the runner itself, but at that speed installing dependencies takes practically the same time as pulling the cache.

Thanks in advance!

[klaus993]

I’m having the same issue (10 MB/s in self-hosted, 100 MB/s in GitHub hosted runners), and I’m wondering: why isn’t the cache hosted locally (in the runner) so there is no need for internet transfer? Where exactly is it hosted?

[omairvaiyani]

We moved to Self-Hosted Runners to reduce our build times with custom AMIs and bigger instances, but our efforts are being hindered by extremely slow cache download and post-job upload steps. What takes just 10-20 seconds on the GitHub hosted runner sometimes takes up to 15 minutes on our Self-Hosted runners.