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Free GitHub Actions hosted runners are significantly slower than local infrastructure

5/10 Medium

Free GitHub-hosted runners perform 4-5x slower than comparable local hardware (e.g., i7-13700H mini-PC). This forces teams running Jenkins locally to accept longer build times (30 min to 40 min) even after parallelization, impacting developer velocity.

GitHub Actions
Category
performance
Workaround
partial
Stage
build
Freshness
persistent
Scope
single_lib
Upstream
open
Recurring
Yes
Buyer Type
team
Maintainer
slow

Sources

Collection History

Query: “What are the most common pain points with GitHub Actions in 2025?”3/27/2026

The free host runners are slow. The free host virtual machines are about 4-5x slower than my mini-PC (i7-13700H) that hosted my Jenkins server.

Created: 3/27/2026Updated: 3/27/2026