The canary flow took ~11.5 min steady-state (and 20 min in an observed
run). Measured from run 30473499191, the time went to five avoidable
places rather than to real work.
1. `npx --yes npm@11.15.0 publish` ran per package, and npx re-resolves
the spec against the registry on EVERY invocation: ~16s of each
package's ~21s. A 9-package channels canary paid ~2.4 min of pure npx
overhead; a 16-package monorepo release paid over 4 min. Hoist the
pinned npm into lib/npm-cli.ts, install it once into a throwaway
prefix, and reuse the binary.
2. publish-release.yml was the only workflow in the repo with no pnpm
store cache, so all three jobs installed 4608 packages cold every
time. Usually ~45s each, but registry-bandwidth bound and heavy
tailed: the observed run spent 9m08s here on tarballs arriving at
2-49 KiB/s. Add the same node-version-keyed cache the rest of CI uses.
3. The notify job ran for canaries only to compute "post nothing" — the
builder already returns should_post=false for mode=prerelease and the
self-watchdog is already gated off. ~85s of dead work on the critical
path, since canary.yml waits for the whole run. Skip the job, keeping
it reachable for a python_publish dispatch.
4. The build job fetched full history for canaries, which need none (no
tag, no GH Release, no release-note commit range, and `nx run-many`
resolves no merge base). That rode along in the 837 MiB workspace
artifact too. Shallow-fetch prereleases; stable keeps depth 0 because
its publish job pushes tags out of that artifact's .git.
5. Two smaller ones: the artifact was gzipped and then re-deflated into
the artifact zip (compression-level: 0), and the orchestrator's
run-discovery loop slept 6s before its first poll.
Verified: 143 release-script tests pass (6 new for the npm-cli helper),
actionlint + shellcheck + the scope-dropdown guard are clean, the
prerelease dry-run path still enumerates all 9 channels packages, and a
live probe confirms the helper installs npm 11.15.0 once (3.2s) and
memoizes thereafter (0ms).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Benjamin Taylor