Remove caches that cost more than they save

Measure cache restore and upload time against the work avoided. Remove caches whose transfer cost outweighs their benefit.

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Prompt

Evaluate and apply this CI technique to my repository: Remove caches that cost more than they save.

Measure cache restore and upload time against the work avoided. Remove caches whose transfer cost outweighs their benefit.

Read the technique and its source-backed company examples: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/remove-expensive-caches.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.

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How companies used this technique

Read what each company changed and follow the original sources.

Remove a cache when restoring it costs more than rebuilding

Linear measured a node_modules cache hit at about 28 seconds to restore, against roughly 7.5 seconds for a filtered install. The cache key depended on a frequently changing lockfile, so Linear removed the cache.

Use it when: Comparable measurements show restore and save overhead outweighing the work avoided.
Before applying it: First try a package-manager store or a narrower cache, and separate miss-rate problems from an expensive successful restore.

Drop a cache that costs more than it saves

Release-tag runs saved Cargo caches that later tagged runs rarely used. Codex removed the cache step from both release workflows and kept compilation, signing, packaging and publishing as they were.

Across 289 release-tag runs: 66,295s spent saving caches against 1,515s restoring them Source

Use it when: Cache save and restore overhead is large and reuse is low.
Before applying it: Check key stability and restore fallbacks first. Removing a cache shortens saves and makes the occasional warm run cold.

How companies used this technique

Remove a cache when restoring it costs more than rebuilding

Drop a cache that costs more than it saves

Related techniques

Reduce the setup floor before increasing shard count

Stop writing caches that no later run restores

Keep unrelated environment changes out of cache keys

Company Playbooks

Related guides

Cache workflow dependencies

Cut repeated test setup

Share setup steps across jobs

Optimize npm installs

Optimize pnpm installs

Bound runner jobs with timeouts