Advantages to slim runners other than price?

[anomiex]

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Following the announcement that the 1vCPU "slim" runners are now generally available, I was wondering if there are advantages for us to use these over the standard runners other than price. The announcement and linked docs only mention that they're lower cost.

We're a public open source repository, so the standard runners are already free for our uses. If I'm going to spend time looking at which of our workflows might be able to be switched, I need something else to point to. 🙂

[vinodbavage31]

The main advantage of the 1vCPU “slim” runners is cost efficiency, which is more relevant for private repositories or organizations paying for GitHub Actions minutes. Since your public repo already gets standard runners for free, there’s little practical benefit in switching—performance might even be slightly lower due to the reduced CPU and memory.

One potential advantage could be faster startup for very lightweight workflows, since slim runners have a smaller footprint, but in most cases, the difference is minimal. If your workflows are already running well on standard runners, there’s no strong reason to switch.

[Sakith-9900]

That's a great question! While the 1vCPU "slim" runners are primarily marketed for their cost benefits, they can offer some additional advantages, especially depending on the type of workflows you're running. Since you're working with a public open-source repository, where cost isn’t a concern, the slim runners could provide some resource efficiency benefits.

For instance, if your workflows involve simpler tasks like linting, basic testing, or deployments, the slim runners might be a good fit. These types of jobs don’t require significant CPU power, and using slim runners for them could help reduce system overhead while speeding up the job execution time. Slim runners are generally lighter, so they can start up more quickly, and you may see faster job initiation for workflows that don’t need heavy computation.

That said, for more CPU-intensive tasks, such as complex builds or tests, the slim runners may not offer the same performance as the standard runners. But for the types of tasks where resource consumption is low, you might find that they run just as well, if not better, due to the reduced overhead. It’s worth experimenting with them for specific workflows to see if they offer a noticeable improvement in terms of execution time or efficiency.

[ThisGuyCodes]

using slim runners for them could help reduce system overhead

Bit confused... what system is having its overhead reduced?