CI: use a Dev Drive to improve Windows I/O performance #13123
Conversation
ichard26
added
skip news
ichard26
force-pushed
the
devdrive
branch
3 times, most recently
from
3326d1c to
be02015
Compare
|
Related issue (but not identical): #12055 |
ichard26
force-pushed
the
devdrive
branch
10 times, most recently
from
cad5bd9 to
6ee4068
Compare
Dev Drives are a modern Windows feature based on the ReFS file system which offers significantly better performance for developer-focused workloads. This is perfect for pip's Windows CI which is still slower than the Unix jobs. Most of the implementation was borrowed from the uv project which also uses a Dev Drive to improve their Windows CI times. There is a community action (samypr100/setup-dev-drive) that can set up a Dev Drive for us, but the Powershell script needed for our simple needs is really not that bad. The small maintenance burden of doing it ourselves is perferable over the risks of using yet another 3rd party action. NB: We used to use a RAM disk to improve I/O performance, but the creation of the RAM disk started to fail intermittently, annoying everyone and eliminating any speed ups gained by the constant retrying needed. See also: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/
|
Sigh, it doesn't seem like the Dev Drive is giving us any sort of speed up. The four Windows jobs durations are on par with the runtimes we've gotten lately 🙁 @zooba am I missing anything obvious? I thought pip's test suite had massive gains on a ReFS disk / Dev Drive in your testing. Maybe I should use the 3rd party action as that should be a known good solution, and then work backwards to fix my custom set up. |
So I tried that and it didn't do anything to improve the times: https://github.com/ichard26/pip/actions/runs/12450861807 I think this idea is dead. |
|
I also tried using the Windows 2025 image as they support Dev Drives (and not just ReFS) but that also didn't help. This is frustrating, but it's time to move on. |
I was reading actions/runner-images#8755 when I saw that the uv project has switched to using a Dev Drive for better Windows CI performance: astral-sh/uv#3522
It turns out that there is a community action (https://github.com/samypr100/setup-dev-drive) that can set up a Dev Drive for us, but the Powershell script needed for our simple needs is really not that bad. I'd prefer keeping the implementation local instead of depending on yet another 3rd party action.