Measure the cost of the release build profile

Measure what the release build profile costs before keeping it.

Prompt

Evaluate and apply this CI technique to my repository: Measure the cost of the release build profile.

Measure what the release build profile costs before keeping it.

Read the technique and its source-backed company examples: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/profile-release-linking.md

Inspect this repository’s CI workflows, build and test commands, dependencies, and recent run timings. Identify where this technique applies and explain the expected benefit using this repository’s evidence.
Measure a baseline from recent comparable runs: elapsed time, queue time, runner minutes and failures where available. If data is unavailable, say what cannot be measured.
Compare relevant company approaches, checking prerequisites, platform differences and tradeoffs. Rank applicable options by evidence, fit and measurable opportunity; do not present company results as predictions for this repo.
Recommend the smallest safe change, show what checks and fallback paths remain, and ASK ME WHICH CHANGE TO APPROVE BEFORE EDITING ANY FILES.
Only after approval, work on a new feature branch, make one reversible change, and open a reviewable pull request. Never merge or push to a default or protected branch.
Keep required checks, test coverage, deployment and release behavior intact. Validate the change and compare equivalent runs where possible; report limitations and what should be monitored after merge.

View all playbooks

How OpenAI used this technique

Read what OpenAI changed and follow the original sources.

Measure the cost of the release build profile

Codex switched its release profile from fat LTO to ThinLTO, kept optimization level 3, and removed the workflow overrides. Its clean-build investigation compared build time, binary size and runtime before choosing.

Clean release build: 2073.893s to 1243.172s; binary 196.7 MiB to 211.8 MiB Source

Use it when: Compilation or linking dominates the critical path of a build job.
Before applying it: ThinLTO made this binary larger and moved measured runtime slightly. Keep representative workload, platform and size checks next to the faster build.

How OpenAI used this technique

Measure the cost of the release build profile

Related techniques

Let an agent iterate against one CI metric

Link release builds with a faster linker

Use build profiles to remove expensive work

Company Playbooks