Restoring cache on MacOS is extremely slow

I figured out restoring the cache is very slow on MacOS. I have created a test case with some node_modules for a React Native application. The following action is used:

uses: actions/cache@v2
with:
    path: 'node_modules'
    key: ${{ runner.os }}-node_modules-${{ hashFiles('**/yarn.lock') }}

Here are the results:

Restoring on ubuntu: Test run 1 took 6s: https://github.com/andrmoel/github-actions-speed-test/runs/3476428716?check_suite_focus=true Test run 2 took 8s: https://github.com/andrmoel/github-actions-speed-test/runs/3476523783?check_suite_focus=true

Restoring on macos: Test run 1 took 3m25s: https://github.com/andrmoel/github-actions-speed-test/runs/3476430657?check_suite_focus=true Test run 2 took 24s: https://github.com/andrmoel/github-actions-speed-test/runs/3476523785?check_suite_focus=true

In the best case restoring the cache on MacOS takes 3 times longer than on ubuntu. But what really makes me worry are the 3m25s from MacOS test run number 1.

Edit: I did some research on another repository and I assume the long action happens every time when the cache was hit the first time.

I have created a test repository with two identical github-actions. One action runs on ubuntu-latest the other one on macos-latest

https://github.com/andrmoel/github-actions-speed-test

[Mattijah]

I’m having the same issue on MacOS. It was taking over 27 minutes to decompress 1.2 GB and it still wasn’t done, so I cancelled it. This isn’t unacceptable. I’m using actions/cache@v3 and macos-11.

[penchef]

@pdotl I’m seeing the same issue.

this repo contains a reproducible workflow

MacOS is consistently much slower than linux:

I’ve also observed this many times in an real world environment of the same dependencies (notice the same hash in both runs 8f697dca40e59245771bc3babd61ce7eec68e51d1af2f99a79dff601c742dfe4):

linux: 30sec

macOS: 2:10min

name: Slow cache example
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
  pull_request:

jobs:
  generate:
    name: generate
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: generate large file to cache
        run: dd if=/dev/urandom of=some-large-file bs=1M count=500
      - name: cache large file
        uses: actions/cache@v3
        with:
          path: some-large-file
          key: ${{ hashFiles('some-large-file') }}
  restore-linux:
    name:  restore-linux
    needs: generate
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: restore cached large file
        uses: actions/cache@v3
        with:
          path: some-large-file
          key: large-file
  restore-macos:
    name:  restore-macos
    needs: generate
    runs-on: macos-12
    steps:
      - name: restore cached large file
        uses: actions/cache@v3
        with:
          path: some-large-file
          key: large-file