PaperClipAI/doc/ci-profiling.md

Profile the complete PR suite

Add the profile-ci label to a PR authored by a CI CODEOWNER. Adding the label starts a fresh PR workflow run. Further pushes while the label remains also run with profiling enabled. The run is named CI profile · PR #number. It runs all lanes of the main PR suite, including middle-of-stack and release-notes-only PRs that normally skip most lanes.

After the run finishes, open its Summary and follow Open the Honeycomb waterfall. The separate CI profile workflow exports the trace after all jobs finish. Its summary has the exact time range, job/span counts, and coverage warnings. Keep the label on the PR and its head unchanged until export finishes. Remove the label to stop profiling subsequent pushes. To profile the same revision again, remove and re-add the label or rerun all jobs.

The PR author, original workflow actor, and rerun actor must all be individual users in the trusted master branch's .github/** CODEOWNERS rule. GitHub user IDs are resolved from that rule; PR edits to CODEOWNERS cannot grant access. A label on an outside contributor's PR does not enable profiling, even when a maintainer applies it. The PR still runs normal CI and needs no Honeycomb access. Failed identity lookups disable profiling.

Ordinary PRs do not write timing artifacts or export traces. The exporter job is skipped for ordinary run names. Adding another label does not run the CI matrix.

Profiling preserves the existing trusted AWS runner routing. Eligible PR jobs use paperclip-public-pr-x64; the routing gate uses paperclip-ci-routing-x64. The existing fail-closed GitHub-hosted fallback still applies if AWS routing cannot be authorized. Only the separate post-run Honeycomb exporter uses ubuntu-latest directly; it is outside the measured PR suite.

Read the waterfall

The workflow root measures elapsed time from run creation to the last job's completion. For reruns, it starts at that attempt's run_started_at instead of the original creation time. Every job is a child on the same wall clock, with its steps and available test details beneath it. All spans use a sample rate of one. There is no sampling within the selected attempt. For a compact Gantt view, open a job row's menu and choose Collapse spans at this depth. Expand an individual job to inspect its steps and test files.

The expandable hierarchy is workflow → job → step → test filename → tests. Vitest, Playwright, and Node file rows use repository-relative filenames, also available in test.file. Separate files retain their own children even when individual test names repeat across files. Honeycomb shows only the 32,000 spans closest to the root in a very large trace. All file rows are near the root, but the chart can omit some individual test rows. Use View events to query all recorded test spans. Test names are limited to 256 characters in the trace; file paths remain intact.

• Compare the jobs that finish last (ci.finishes_last) with other overlapping work. A long job that finishes early is not necessarily delaying CI.
• Expand setup, dependency installation, cache restore, Rust compilation, builds, and tests to find repeated or slow work.
• ci.execution_ms measures a job's execution. ci.start_offset_ms shows when it started relative to the whole run. Do not add parallel job durations to calculate elapsed time.
• Waiting spans cover job creation to runner start. Dependency waits can occur before GitHub creates a job, so they appear as gaps from the workflow start. GitHub does not expose a separate ready timestamp; do not interpret every gap as runner queue time or claim this is a computed dependency critical path.

GitHub job/step timestamps have second precision. Vitest and Playwright record test timestamps at the runner. Node's test reporter records completion receipt time and duration (test.clock=reporter-receipt); buffered IPC delivery can shift those small test spans. Vitest file spans include its test/hook execution and carry collection/setup durations as fields. Playwright file spans cover the first through last test attempt in that file. Rust and standalone script checks retain their full job/step timings; stable libtest does not expose per-test wall timestamps. The trace is CI timing data, not application tracing.

Scope includes all main PR lanes: policy, typecheck/release registry, general and serialized tests, Runner checks, Docker context checks, build, canary dry run, browser E2E, and aggregate checks. Separate Storybook, image, deployment, release, and live-provider eval workflows are outside this trace.

Failure, coverage, and reruns

The exporter uses GitHub's attempt-specific job API and paginates jobs and artifacts. It includes failed and cancelled jobs and uploads available test timings with always(). A force-cancelled or failed setup job may leave no artifact. Coverage warnings and ci.profile_complete=false make missing artifacts, interrupted reporters, rejected data, and absent test details visible. Test launchers write an expected-invocation record before starting each Vitest, Playwright, or Node process. Each reporter must write matching start/end records, so a missing reporter cannot hide behind another successful invocation in the same job. Direct package scripts can start a reporter without the launcher; their start/end pair proves collection. Compare ci.expected_invocations with ci.reported_invocations. Failed or cancelled workflows are conservatively incomplete because a failed command can prevent later tests or steps from running.

Each attempt gets a different trace ID. Rerunning failed jobs alone produces an attempt trace for those jobs; it does not replay completed jobs. Reruns are marked ci.partial_rerun=true conservatively. Use a fresh label-triggered run for an unambiguous full-suite baseline. GitHub may carry earlier successful jobs into the new attempt's job inventory. Jobs completed before the new attempt started are excluded and counted in ci.carried_job_count.

The exporter sends bounded batches with pauses and retries only events that Honeycomb rejects temporarily. If export still fails, inspect CI profile before rerunning it. A partial HTTP export may already have sent some spans; reruns use the same IDs but the Events API does not promise deduplication. Timing artifacts remain available for 14 days. Invalid/oversized artifacts stop export instead of silently truncating the suite. No logs, environment dumps, error messages, stack traces, or credentials are included in the exported field allowlist.

Operator setup and activation

Use the existing Honeycomb paperclip team, test environment, and a separate service dataset named paperclip-ci. Create GitHub environment ci-profiling with Selected branches and tags: allow only the branch master, with no PR-ref or tag patterns. Store environment secret HONEYCOMB_CI_API_KEY with a dedicated ingest-only key for the Honeycomb test environment. Do not create a repository- or organization-level secret of that name: the environment restriction prevents in-repository PR workflows from requesting the key. Tests still execute the PR branch; only the separate exporter runs from master. It needs event ingest permission; dataset creation permission is needed only if the dataset has not been created yet. Do not store the environment configuration key in CI. Create the repository label profile-ci if it does not exist.

ci-profile.yml runs from the trusted default-branch revision. It checks out only the exporter, installs no dependencies, and parses PR artifacts as bounded JSON without extracting or executing their contents. The PR jobs never receive the Honeycomb key. The exporter independently verifies CI CODEOWNER identities, the current label, repository, and exact tested PR revision before reading artifacts or sending data. Its credential is sent only in an HTTPS header to api.honeycomb.io; redirects are rejected. Exported fields are allowlisted. CODEOWNERS also covers scripts/ci-profile/**, so changes to the privileged exporter require infrastructure-owner review.

The new trusted workflow and routing definitions must merge to master before the label-triggered journey is active. A PR uses pr-trusted.yml@master and ci-routing.yml@master; do not change those trust references just to test this feature before merge.

Local qualification

node --test .github/scripts/tests/ci-profile.test.mjs .github/scripts/tests/ci-routing.test.mjs
node --test scripts/ci-profile/reporters.test.mjs
actionlint .github/workflows/{pr,pr-trusted,ci-routing,ci-profile}.yml
node scripts/ci-profile/export.mjs --run-id=RUN_ID --attempt=1 --historical --dry-run --output=/tmp/ci-trace.json

--historical is local-only and permits a deliberate export of an existing unlabeled run. It has complete GitHub job/step timing but cannot reconstruct test details that were never recorded. Omit --dry-run and supply HONEYCOMB_CI_API_KEY to send the selected baseline to Honeycomb. It is labeled as historical/incomplete test coverage; it is not proof of the label-triggered workflow.

References: Honeycomb trace fields, Events API, large trace display limit, GitHub workflow_run.

Qualify reductions in CI work

For changes to the stable test launcher, dependency setup, or the large Git and readiness fixtures, profile-ci also runs CI work benchmark. It uses one GitHub-hosted runner without secrets or AWS access. It compares the unchanged PR base and candidate sequentially. It records complete command times, test inventories, revisions, and failure logs in the ci-work-benchmark artifact. The serialized shard must retain the same cases. The fixture comparison retains the database contract and splits large Git scanning from bounded staging. These command timings exclude queue time and setup; use the full Honeycomb waterfall to assess the complete CI critical path.

The benchmark also exercises cold dependency setup and a real materialized cache restore after removing the installed directories. Its two qualification entries are scoped to the PR merge ref and a separate checkout path. They cannot populate master's caches. Normal PR lanes restore only; the exact canonical master push in release verification is the normal cache writer.

Materialized dependency keys include every tracked package manifest, lockfile, workspace configuration, patches, repository scripts, Node version/ABI, platform, architecture, libc, pnpm version, store location, and physical checkout path. There are no prefix restores. An input change takes the normal install path. A stale lockfile uses the existing resolution fallback but cannot publish an entry. An additional workspace install/prepare hook disables materialized reuse until its inputs are modeled. Shared/SDK build outputs have a separate key that also includes both packages' source/configuration and the build verifier. The existing verifier checks source and output fingerprints and rebuilds incomplete or changed output. Tests and their results are never cached or omitted by this mechanism.

Serialized shards share one Vitest controller with forks, isolate, one worker, and file parallelism disabled. Each file gets a separate process and test home/configuration. The isolation regression runs files in both orders and checks process IDs, environment, globals, fake timers, and filesystem state.

The readiness regression uses a real one-second PostgreSQL idle timeout and verifies that the backend connection changes while the parent write can commit. Its configured readiness window stays long. The Git regression keeps all four filename lanes above 32 MiB, while the staging case transfers and deletes 4,000 files whose filename list exceeds 2 MiB. It still checks every staged file, unusual names, snapshot ownership, cleanup, and bounded command lengths.