Contrary to the prevailing wisdom, cores aren't everything. For many workloads, peak single-core frequency has the biggest impact on overall performance.

CI jobs tend to be composed of a combination of tooling with glue code holding everything together. Individual tools might take advantage of all available cores, but they tend to taper towards a single-core as they complete their task. Combining multiple tools, back-to-back, with serial scripts and waiting for large artifact transfers can result in something like the example above. Despite 8 cores being available, most of them are barely utilized.

Increasing the CPU frequency would have the biggest impact, even when coupled with a reduction of core count. Gitlab only offers different core counts, all running at mediocre frequencies. By contrast, Cedar CI utilizes purpose built hardware to deliver the fastest core speeds. Our CPUs offer 2-3 times the performance of leading CI providers. Coupled with the fastest cache around, our results are hard to match.

Our cores will end up reducing your CI cost while saving engineer time, which is far more valuable. Realize just how fast your CI can be today by leveraging Cedar CI.