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Rafael Garcia Lara
Rafael Garcia Lara

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Fix slow tests with Jest in Github Actions

At bob.io we were migrating a ton of repositories from our oldie Jenkins to GitHub Actions and everything was going really smooth, in some of our tests with mocha and chai we shaved a nice 40% running time, and with the matrix strategy, we can run a lot of test in parallel removing a lot of friction from our CI process.

We were in heaven until we migrated a frontend app with tests made in Jest.

On our first try the tests took a hefty amount of time

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For reference the same tests in Jenkins 🤔

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The same tests on my computer 🚀

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At first glance, it appeared that is CPU bound, but in mocha and chai the history was the opposite, we reduced the run times, so I did a small investigation using the time command like this:

/usr/bin/time -v npm run test

In my computer the tests were parallelized and used a good amount of CPU power
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Meanwhile, in the Github runners, the history was different
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Looks like, under the hood, Jest checks the number of cores available and uses as much as possible but never uses all the cores, the instances running our test have 2 cores available but Jest only uses 1.

After digging into the Jest documentation I found the maxWorkers option which allows you to control the number of CPU cores used.

I tried to run the same test but forced the workers to fully use the available cores in the runner:

/usr/bin/time -v npm run test -- --maxWorkers=2

Not 200% but better CPU usage:
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And even better run times:
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Just for the sake of curiosity, I tested with 3 workers and it took 1:34 so we left it with 2 workers.

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