Thanks for the reply and sorry for the late response!
The specified time was only on the layer that builds the app in dockerfile. All the layers slowed down by about 10% but the build layer is slowed down the most (this is the most resource intensive layer).
This got to be a docker issue with the machines.
We tried running on the same base image circleci/node:8.11 on docker as on normal tests. The instructions are the same as the normal test. The problem persisted.
We don’t want to use the machine executor because the spin up is taking too long. I could build the app in the “test” environment and than pass it to the docker build, but I don’t think this is good for consistency.
Thank you!