Migrating from python:jessie to CircleCI:jessie image - should I expect performance improvements?

Build Environment
1

Hi,

We currently use Circle CI 1.

We’ve been using python:2.7.15-jessie and because of the repeated docker image fetch times (15-20 seconds) we thought about migrating to the CircleCI provided image circleci/python:2.7.15-jessie

Should we expect any performance improvements ?
Is there any way to cache the docker image from being downloaded on every build from DockerHub ?

Thanks in advance,
Ohad

2

How big is that image? Could you switch to a smaller one, e.g. Alpine? That can often result in much smaller images (e.g. dropping from 600M to 100M).

3

circleci/python:2.7.15-jessie - 1020855685 (1.02GB)
python:2.7.15-jessie - 685990012 (685MB)
python:2.7.15-alpine - 61189773 (61MB)

I still need to test whether we could use Alpine instead of Jessie in our CI process

4

Ha, some excellent space saving there! :grin: :+1:

Of course, the Circle image may have useful stuff in it that you end up installing, but even so…

5

I succeeded in doing this change, it took some time but we were able to drastically reduce the time it takes to deploy our system using Alpine compared to Jessie

Thanks for your hint @halfer

1 Like
6

Great! I recommend setting up a separate pipeline for your base image, in which you can run tests, push it to a registry, etc. Your CI is a production system, so the building of your CI images should be in a production pipeline.