Blacksmith's GitHub Actions runners finished the same job 3 to 4 times faster than GitHub hosted Actions, across 10 trials
Disclosure: I have no affiliation with Blacksmith. Nobody asked me to write this and nobody paid for it. I installed their GitHub App like anyone else would. I pointed the same GitHub Actions job at two runners, ubuntu-latest and Blacksmith's blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2404 , ran each one 10 times, and timed the actual work with date , not the wall-clock job duration GitHub shows you. Blacksmith…
Blacksmith claims that its GitHub Actions runners are 3 to 4 times faster than the hosted Actions across 10 trials. The company sells bare-metal hardware runners instead of GitHub's virtualized ones, with pricing at $45M valuation. However, the source found that the Blacksmith runners were unavailable for personal repositories, even after migrating to an organization account.
The benchmarking workflow ran the same Node script 10 times each for two parallel jobs, one on GitHub-hosted runners and one on Blacksmith runners. The results showed that Blacksmith was consistently faster, with a speedup of 3.17x for one script and 3.77x for another. The ranges of speeds did not overlap, indicating that the difference was not due to noise.
Despite these impressive speed gains, the source did not switch to Blacksmith due to the requirement for organization accounts and the lack of real-world cost data.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
