[nicoburns]

If you have the money to throw at it, you can get a long way optimising CI pipelines just by throwing faster hardware at it. The sort of server you could rent for ~$150/month might easily be ~5x faster than your typical Github Actions hosted runner.

[hobofan]

Besides faster hardware, one of the main features (and drawbacks) you get with self-hosted runners is the option to break through build isolation, and have performant caches between builds.

With many other build systems I'd be hesitant to do that, but since Cargo is very good about what to rebuild for incremental builds, keeping the cache around is a huge speed boost.

[Seattle3503]

Yes, this is often the best "low-hanging fruit" option, but it can get expensive. It depends how you value your developer time.