Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

brianwawok

Ran into the same exact thing at CircleCI.

Me: My builds are really slow

CircleCI: Here are a few very low effort answers

Me: git checkout is taking literally 60 seconds, but it takes 3 seconds locally, why?

CircleCI: Mumble Mumble.

They charge per minute, so why would they care if builds are slow? Was about a year of this getting worse and worse, till I finally cancelled the service last week and built my own server in my basement.

I know get 200% faster builds, and the hardware payback time is not very long (6 months of my CircleCI bill?).

I think it's a huge red flag anytime the metric you care about is something that being "worse" makes the provider more money.

View on HN

100% and not just in tech: when a party’s incentives aren’t aligned with yours, you’ll often find yourself getting little help or even working in opposition to each other. We recently experienced this with filing for a health related insurance claim. My wife wondered why they kept losing stuff, not doing what they promised, or asking for more paper work. I kept explaining to her that while not necessarily malicious, they have very little incentive to improve that department.

Always try to find partners or counter parties who win when you do as well. I know we don’t always have that luxury but sometimes a little headache initially is better than being stuck with someone who works in opposition to you in the long run.

Thanks so much for sharing your story. We are in the process of outsourcing some of our Jenkins functionality and these stories are useful to hear.

From the front page of CircleCI. __________________________________________________ Industry-leading speed As soon as you think it, you can deliver it. Your developers’ time is too important to waste. No other CI/CD platform takes performance as seriously as we do. Your pipelines should accelerate your business, not slow you down. __________________________________________________

Rule of thumb: Anyone talking about their honesty is not honest.

We did the same thing but with self hosted runners with github actions.

https://github.com/philips-labs/terraform-aws-github-runner

phillips-labs has some good resources for scaling this up as well.

I love that CircleCI flaunts it's speed compared to other providers, meanwhile we can clearly see the CircleCI steps take the longest in our builds.

Not to mention the constant failures.

> They charge per minute, so why would they care if builds are slow?

It's worse than just not caring: they have a direct financial incentive to make sure your builds are as slow as you'll tolerate.

At a previous startup, we dumped CircleCI and switched to Jenkins on our own EC2 instance. We had a lot less problems. (This was way back in 2016, I'm sure things have improved now.)

Yup!

I ended up doing TeamCity over Jenkins, but they do the same thing.

Amazing how fast a 32C / 64T EYPC server in my basement can be..

I can only imagine! I have a 3950X here (16C / 32T) with 128 gigs of RAM and it is incredible. Total overkill for a home lab though.

Those app rental scooters that are littered around city centers: you pay for distance as well as for time. And that's why they don't go very fast.

No, they're legally limited to 15 MPH for safety. You also don't pay for distance, just time. Not everything is a conspiracy theory.

SF: https://www.williamweisslaw.com/sf-e-scooter-laws/ NYC: https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/ebikes.shtml#:....

Also because going fast on those things is fucking dangerous, especially when (like most people riding them) you're not wearing a helmet.

And have been drinking (it's what I saw a lot of)

Absolutely. I don't have a problem with most scooter owners, but here in a city with a lot of tourism, the rental scooters are often a menace. I was waiting outside of a restaurant and took half a step back to let some people through. I brushed against something moving fast, and it was some tall yahoo going downhill at max speed on a scooter. If I'd taken a full step back, somebody would have needed medical treatment.

Learning how to ride one of those in a city takes time, practice, and thought. Which you will surely get if you buy one. But apparently not so for the rentals.

In that particular case another reason could be that they quite reasonably don't want you going very fast for safety and liability concerns.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com