🔗 Why 98.5% of organizations have slow actions/checkout

If you're using GitHub Actions, you've probably used actions/checkout thousands of times to clone your repository onto your CI runner. For many repositories, you never need to think about it. But for large monorepos, cloning can take forever.

Darwin Sanoy's GitLab blog on optimizing git clone operations inspired us to see how we could apply similar optimizations to GitHub Actions.

We analyzed over 60,000 real-world checkout steps from all organizations using Depot's fast GitHub Actions runners. 98.5% of organizations use the default checkout settings. There is potential for massive performance gains.

We benchmarked one of our own repositories and by applying a few simple optimizations, we reduced clone times by 96.6%: from 60s to 2s.

Not every repo will see the same gains as our benchmark. But if you're experiencing painful clone times, these optimizations might offer a cure.