On: We don’t use a staging environment

[_3u10]

Multiply that by the lost hours waiting for compilation, etc and whether you have staging or not doesn’t matter.

[SOLAR_FIELDS → _3u10]

It’s crazy sometimes how big of a difference it is. One recent example - I had to build a custom Docker image of some OSS project. Not even a huge one - only what I would call small-mid size. Just clone the repo and run the makefile, super simple. It took 35 minutes to build on my 2020 Mac Mini (Intel) and would have been probably half that if I had the most recent machine.

[eertami → _3u10]

Why would I build on a local machine vs running the build on a server in a datacenter? Per your own arguments, server grade hardware is going to compile much faster than any local workstation.

[_3u10 → eertami]

That’s not really true, because of Amdahl’s law you need good single thread perf in addition to a reasonable amount of cores.

Often workstation class processors, like an i9 are the sweet spot, especially with ccache as only one file is being recompiled.

Servers often sacrifice single thread performance for many more cores.

[relaxing → eertami]

Compile time might be fractionally faster, but the latency of the CI pipeline gets you.

[chupasaurus → _3u10]

Ah, good old "compiling" [0]. When a worker needs a $4000 machine to actually do his work then it's unavoidable. The slow machine? $2000 out to be enough™ for everyone else.

[0] https://xkcd.com/303/