[joeblau]

Behavior and issues

Make candidate quality and docs CI faster on the self-hosted Mac mini runners ([self-hosted, macOS, ARM64]). Verified against GitHub Actions runs and the cache store from 17–20 Oct 2026; publish.yml is untouched.

Every job stays on the minis. Playwright remains Chromium and WebKit only.

Changes and expected time savings

Verified this repo’s cache store and step timings (not only the Oct 17–20 note):

• Cache store: 10.59 GB / 26 entries. 10 npm caches = 10.05 GB, mostly per-PR/branch refs (refs/pull/*/merge, hig/*). Font caches are ~4 MB each and stay.
• Quality run max 33.1 min (p50 6.6 min). Smoking gun: Post Run actions/setup-node 1655 s (27.6 min) on native (run 39287592105) while saving ~1.1 GB at ~1 MB/s.
• Quality upload-artifact 36 s typical, max 362 s (same run); browser upload 24 s typical, max 183 s. Both currently if: always().
• Docs p50 2.1 min, long tails 31 min and a 160 min PR wait whose job itself was 75 s (queue behind cache saves / uploads). Pages artifact upload on PRs is 4–23 s and unused because deploy only runs on main.

Change	What	Expected saving
Drop cache: npm from the three setup-node blocks in quality.yml and the one in docs.yml	No remote dependency cache on self-hosted runners. Minis already keep ~/.npm. Pinned setup-node v4 has no package-manager-cache input (that is v5+); comments warn not to re-add cache: npm or to set package-manager-cache: false if the pin moves to v5. Font actions/cache (~4 MB) is unchanged.	Removes restore 30–90 s on cold GitHub cache and save tails up to ~27 min (Post setup-node). Stops growing the 10 GB npm cache store. npm ci should stay in the 35–50 s range from the on-disk cache.
Quality + browser upload-artifact if: always() → if: failure()	Uploads are useful for failed visual/review debugging. Release tooling does not download them: publish.yml only requires a successful quality run for the commit, then rebuilds. release:dry-run and smoke:release-artifact still run in the quality job.	~36 s p50 / up to 362 s off green quality jobs; ~24 s p50 / up to 183 s off green browser jobs. Failed runs still upload captures and tarballs.
Skip Pages artifact (and gtar) on PRs in docs.yml	docs:build and check -w hig-docs still run on every PR. Upload + gtar only when github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' && github.event_name != 'pull_request' (same condition as deploy).	~10–23 s off PR docs jobs, plus less mini occupancy so docs no longer sits behind 30–160 min queues as often.

publish.yml is not modified (separate release PR).

Observed on this PR (green on the minis)

Runs quality 39507834646 and docs 39507834659 on mini-m4-02, mini-m6-01, and mini-m6-02 (self-hosted, macOS, ARM64).

Step	Before (worst / typical)	This PR
setup-node restore	30–92 s	0 s on quality, native, browser, docs
Post setup-node (npm cache save)	1655 s worst	0–1 s
quality upload-artifact	36 s p50 / 362 s max	skipped (green run, 0 artifacts)
browser upload-artifact	24 s p50 / 183 s max	skipped
docs Pages upload	4–23 s on PRs	skipped; deploy skipped
npm ci	35–50 s	44–47 s (on-disk ~/.npm)
quality / native / browser job	336 s / 211 s / 323 s recent green	278 s / 177 s / 203 s
docs build job	~2 min p50	38 s

Wall-clock quality was ~99 min because jobs queued ~80 min for a mini; once scheduled, the jobs themselves were faster and produced no GitHub artifacts.

Validation

• YAML workflows parse; all quality.yml / docs.yml jobs remain [self-hosted, macOS, ARM64].
• Playwright install stays chromium webkit.
• CI on this PR is green: candidate quality + Documentation on the minis.

Platform limitations and migration/rollback

• First green run after this lands may npm ci from registry if a mini’s ~/.npm is cold; later runs use the on-disk cache.
• Existing GitHub node-cache-* entries age out; they are no longer written.
• Maintainers who want tarballs/docs out/ from a green run will need a failed rerun or a local dry-run; release publication still rebuilds.