As the title of this post suggests, I’m experiencing extremely long build times.
My computer only takes a few minutes to build this project. Cloud Build can (and sometimes does) do it in about 15 minutes. But usually it’s more like 1-2 hours. Sometimes longer than 3, 4, even 5 hours. And that’s for “successful” builds, not just ones that automatically cancel and restart due to getting stuck.
Please tell me this isn’t normal. These long build times almost make the Cloud Build service pointless.
The time shown includes the time the build was in the queue waiting to build. Queue times can vary wildly based on demand - especially in the free tier. Certain times of day the demand in the free tier is incredibly high, and builds will it longer than normal in the queue. We do offer paid tiers which have a separate queue from the free queue and typically much more consistent in terms of demand.
I was under the impression that the queue was on a per-project or per-organization basis, and that it would start new builds if it had been an hour since the last build finished. But what you’re saying is that I’m sharing a queue with everyone else in the free tier?
Can we please get the more detailed information in the dashboard that differentiates between time waiting in a queue and time spent actually building? It’s fairly disconcerting to see a project go from building in 17 minutes to taking over 5 hours. It kind of makes me start to panic a little and think “Alright, what did I (or a team member) do to mess up the project?”
Thanks.
Essentially there are two queues. Your organization queue, which limits the maximum number of builds you can have running for all projects in your organization depending on which billing tier you are on. Then there is also a global queue which are separate for free vs. paid billing tiers. This allows us to balance the number of build machines we are running based on how much demand there is. The total number of build machines is something we are always working on tuning, but the reality is that certain times of day are just going to have considerably higher demand than others and some wait time should be expected occasionally for the free tier.
If you click on the “Summary” for a build (listed under that Actions section on the build history), it breaks out the actual time spent building separate from the full time. You’re right though that we don’t do a good job of showing the rest of the timing information (particularly how long the build sat in the queue). This is a good reminder that we need to improve on showing more of this information both in the build history and on that summary page.
Thank you for taking the time to explain these things to me, @dannyd . I appreciate it.
