Poor performance in pnpm monorepo

[nick-fields]

I love the idea of this. I saw the Reddit and Earthly posts and wanted to give it a shot.

Test results were not good in a large pnpm monorepo. The test was simple, 1 setup job and a dependent lint job that relied on setup to cache the dependencies, repeated using both the default GitHub actions/node cache and then ucache. Both on empty caches. When I rerun the workflow (using the Re-run all jobs button in the GitHub UI), the results are the same for ucache but even faster for setup using the default GitHub cache (due to cache hit).

I suspect I'm just missing some configuration somewhere.

Repo

• Node 18.19.0
• PNPM 9.4.0
• 57 workspaces
• 680MB of dependencies

Results

	Actions Cache	Ucache
Overall time	11m43s	25m44s
Install job time	2m44s	8m31s
Lint job time	8m46s	16m56s

Workflow

name: Ucache Demo
on:
  push:

jobs:
  setup-ucache:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
        with:
          version: 9.4.0
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version-file: ./.nvmrc
      - uses: earthly/setup-ucacher@main
        with:
          log-level: info
      - run: ucacher pnpm install

  setup-actions-cache:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
        with:
          version: 9.4.0
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version-file: ./.nvmrc
          cache: "pnpm"
      - run: pnpm install

  lint-ucache:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    needs: setup-ucache
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          show-progress: false
      - uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
        with:
          version: 9.4.0
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version-file: ./.nvmrc
      - uses: earthly/setup-ucacher@main
      - run: ucacher pnpm install
      - run: ucacher pnpm lint-quiet

  lint-actions-cache:
    runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
    needs: setup-actions-cache
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          show-progress: false
      - uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
        with:
          version: 9.4.0
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version-file: ./.nvmrc
          cache: "pnpm"
      - run: pnpm install
      - run: pnpm lint-quiet

Notes

I see these warnings when any ucache command is run. Maybe some additional config is missing?

[ucacher] cache miss: (env: LOG_LEVEL, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: INVOCATION_ID, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: GITHUB_ENV, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: RUNNER_NAME, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: SYSTEMD_EXEC_PID, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: GITHUB_RUN_ATTEMPT, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: GITHUB_TOKEN, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: GITHUB_JOB, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: RUNNER_TRACKING_ID, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: ACTIONS_RUNTIME_TOKEN, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: GITHUB_PATH, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: GITHUB_STATE, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: GITHUB_OUTPUT, different environment variable)
[ucacher] cache miss: (env: JOURNAL_STREAM, different environment variable)

[idelvall]

I love the idea of this. I saw the Reddit and Earthly posts and wanted to give it a shot.

That's great, thanks for giving it a try and sharing your feedback!

I see these warnings when any ucache command is run. Maybe some additional config is missing?

Yes, you are getting cache misses due to those env entries changing their values across builds. You should ignore them in order to get a cache hit