Benchmark: RisingWave builds 11.5x faster on Avrea than GitHub Actions
On GitHub Actions, a no-cache RisingWave build takes 21 minutes 40 seconds. On Avrea, the same build, same 2 vCPU spec: 10 minutes 48 seconds without cache, 1 minute 52 seconds with a warm sccache.
Why RisingWave
RisingWave is a distributed streaming database written in Rust. It depends on dozens of crates and has a deep transitive dependency graph.
Rust builds are expensive. The compiler does a lot of work per crate: parsing, type-checking, borrow-checking, and LLVM codegen and so-on. Cargo handles incremental builds on a single machine, but there's no first-party solution for sharing compiled output across machines, which is what you need on CI.
sccache, originally built by Mozilla, is the de facto fix: a compiler-level cache that hashes the inputs to each compilation (source, compiler flags, etc.) and stores the output object file. On a cache hit, the compiler doesn't run.
How we ran the test
We ran cargo build --release on both sides. Rust stable, 2 vCPU runners, the same pinned RisingWave commit.
Results
Hardware alone runs at 2x. Pointing sccache at Avrea's remote cache brings the warm time down to 1 minute 52 seconds, for 11.5x total.
Why it's faster
Rust compilation is heavily single-threaded per crate, with some parallelism across independent crates. Avrea's single-core CPU and disk I/O both matter.
sccache catches the compilation work when inputs haven't changed. On a cached build with most crate inputs matching, sccache returns cached object files and rustc just runs the linker at the end. Avrea's cache backing is co-located with the runners.
Other benchmarks in this series
- Bazel (39.7x)
- Linux kernel (68x)
- Ghostty (27x)
- Kafka (6.6x)
- Next.js (142x)
What Avrea is
A one-line YAML change moves your build to Avrea. runs-on: avrea-ubuntu-latest, and your Cargo build runs on our hardware instead of GitHub's.
Each job gets step-level resource metrics, full-text search across logs, and live SSH into the VM.
