Colocated Cache
4x faster cache reads and writes with the Blacksmith cache
The Blacksmith cache co-locates cache artifacts in the same datacenter park as the bare metal instances running our VMs, and can almost saturate the NIC on our runners. GitHub’s cache action stores cache artifacts in Azure Blob Storage, which generally performs poorly when the action runner is not co-located in the same AZ as the storage.
The Speed Difference
The standard GitHub cache, usually gets you up to 100MB/s. With the Blacksmith cache we have seen customer workflows
download at speeds of over 400MB/s.
Cache Analytics
Blacksmith provides out of the box analytics on cache usage, hits, and evictions per repository. This allows you to quickly identify repositories with growing cache usage, or high eviction rates (indicating high churn in cache artifacts).
Cache Size
The Blacksmith cache provides 25GB of free storage per repo per week, a substantial increase from GitHub’s 10GB to maximize your cache hits. Like GitHub, our cache also evicts the least recently used cache entries that were last accessed more than 7 days ago. Contact us at [email protected] if you’d like us to increase the allowed cache size for your organization.
The Blacksmith cache is a drop-in replacement for GitHub’s cache action, actions/cache. To migrate, refer to our guide.