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How to find the slow step in a workflow
The pipeline is slow but every individual step looks reasonable.
5 min read
The pipeline is slow but every individual step looks reasonable.
Why it happens
The bottleneck is often the critical path through job dependencies, not any single step. A fast job that waits on a slow one contributes its full wait to the total.
How to fix it
- Sort steps by duration, then map the job dependency graph
- Look for jobs whose needs list forces them to wait on something unrelated
- Check queue time separately — it is not shown in step durations
- Export the run as OpenTelemetry spans to see the critical path directly
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