GitHub-hosted runners: Double the power for open source

GitHub is thrilled to announce the completion of an upgrade to our GitHub Actions-hosted runners by offering larger more powerful machines to open source developers.

From now on, any Linux or Windows workflow triggered from a public repository, using GitHub’s default labels, will run on our faster, more powerful 4-vCPU runners.

These new machines provide up to a 25% increase in performance for most CI/CD workloads without any configuration change required.

Faster and still free for open source

Since its inception in 2019, GitHub Actions has always been free for public repositories. While it has been very widely adopted by our open source communities, the underlying machines have remained the same 2-vCPU based virtual machines. From December 1,2023, we started upgrading our fleet of Linux and Windows Action runners to newer 4-vCPU based virtual machines. We are pleased to announce that we completed that upgrade today, and we now provide machines that are double their previous specification, with 4-vCPUs, 16 GiB of memory.

Through the rollout, we have seen real-world improvements of around 25% for GitHub Actions workflows on these new machines without any changes required from you as a developer. These performance improvements will help garner faster feedback loops in your pull requests and decrease time spent waiting for builds to finish. For those teams with larger workloads, the new machines offer twice the memory.

GitHub Actions and the open source community

GitHub Actions plays a vital role for many open source projects, providing them with free hosted build servers and automation capabilities that are easy to get set up and run with instantly. But the open source community also plays a huge part in why GitHub Actions was quickly adopted by developers around the world. The GitHub Marketplace offers over 20,000 actions and apps for organizations and the GitHub community to discover and build. This wealth of knowledge helps developers at every organization, regardless of size, get started on GitHub Actions and Apps and improve their workflows today.

“GitHub is the home for the open source community, so I’m thrilled we’ve been able to give all open source projects access to Linux and Windows machines that have twice the v-CPUs, twice the memory and 10 times the storage for their builds, for free,” said Martin Woodward, GitHub’s vice president of developer relations. “This investment will give valuable time back to the maintainers of open source projects who benefited from over 7 billion build minutes with GitHub Actions in the past year alone.”

Get started today

This upgrade offers increased performance and memory with 4-vCPUs and 16 GiB of memory. Public repositories can see the benefits of these updates today, with no required changes. Simply run your public workflows using any of the existing Ubuntu or Windows labels, and they now will automatically run on the new 4-core hosted runners.

Written by

Larissa Fortuna

@lkfortuna