Why is bitbucket pipelines very slow?

[Fernane Zohair]

Since last week pipelines are very slow, especially the following tasks for each step:

• starting the agent
• cloning

I went from 2 minutes to 6 - 8 minutes per deployment. Have you also experienced the same issues?

[kw · Accepted solution]

Yes, I can confirm that my pipelines are also awfully slow today, some are failing on git checkout :(

[Andrei Kazantsev]

Yes, we've confirm that too, start for every step become incredibly slow,

clonning from repo takes from 10 up to 20 min

[Fernane Zohair]

Well, at least I am glad to read that. I hope they will fix that soon...

[obrizan]

From my personal experience: I use Bitbucket Pipelines daily for 7+ years, sometimes delays in provisioning and build setup happens.

Recently I've started a separate project to monitor Bitbucket Pipelines performance (CIPerf). This project automatically pushes changes to a repository hourly. The pipeline is triggered. Average time between push is over and the very first line of "script" section is 25 seconds, lowest is 18 seconds, and there are several worst cases: 03:28, 01:16, 00:59. So it proves that sometimes Bitbucket Pipelines may cause a significant delays with build setups.

Couple ideas how to optimise build setups:

1. Set Git clone option to 1 (in your log it is 50). So Bitbucket will checkout only the very recent version of your repository, not 50 previous versions. Git clone behavior/Depth.
2. Disable caches downloading (in case you don't need them).
3. Try different Docker images, e. g. use *-alpine versions of images. Alpine images are 5-10 times smaller than default images, so they will be fetched faster.
4. Hope it helps to speed-up your pipelines jobs. 

[Attila Szeremi]

Yes, Bitbucket Pipelines steps have had huge overhead since I starting using them 3 years ago.

And because of that, despite it being a bad practice, I'm doing everything in a single step, otherwise my 6 minute build time would take 8 minutes or more.

[Jon Blaze]

Can confirm that the build time has increased dramatically.

My usual build time used to be under 2 minutes, now for some odd reason it is now taking a little over 6 minutes.