First

[anishg-bit]

Add CI Benchmark workflow for MonkCI vs GitHub-hosted runner comparison

📝 Summary

Added .github/workflows/ci-benchmark.yml — a new workflow designed to benchmark build-and-test job timing across available MonkCI runners against the standard ubuntu-latest GitHub-hosted runner.

Key Changes:

• Job Renamed: The job is now named build-and-test with a dynamic display name: name: build-and-test (${{ matrix.runner }}).
• Runner Matrix: Implemented a matrix.runner strategy running in parallel with fail-fast: false. It now covers the 2 available MonkCI variants alongside ubuntu-latest as the baseline.
• CI Test Steps: Replaced previous build steps with a standard Node.js CI pipeline for an accurate apples-to-apples comparison.
• Timing Instrumentation: Added step-level timing to capture Unix timestamps (date +%s) at the start and end (using always()). It computes duration = end - start and writes a Markdown table row to $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY.

🎯 Motivation

To quantify the performance difference between available MonkCI runners and the standard GitHub-hosted ubuntu-latest runner on a real Node.js CI workload (install + test).

🚀 Runners Under Test

Runner	Reason Included / Status
ubuntu-latest	GitHub standard baseline
monkci-runners-4vcpu	MonkCI's only currently Idle runner (will pick up jobs immediately)
monkci-ubuntu-24.04-4-3600iops	Registered but Offline (may still pick up if it comes online)

🛠️ What each job does

1. Records start timestamp into $GITHUB_OUTPUT before any work begins.
2. Checks out the repo (actions/checkout@v4).
3. Sets up Node.js 22 (actions/setup-node@v4).
4. Configures npm (npm config set loglevel error).
5. Installs dependencies (npm install).
6. Runs tests (npm run test-ci).
7. Records end time and computes duration, appending a Markdown table row to the Action's Job Summary.

📊 How to read the results

After the workflow completes, open the Actions run and check each job's Summary tab. Each runner will output a summary table looking like this:

Runner	Duration (s)
ubuntu-latest	85
monkci-runners-4vcpu	47

Compare each MonkCI row against ubuntu-latest to see the absolute time saved per runner tier from a single workflow run.

✅ Test Plan

• Trigger workflow via workflow_dispatch to confirm all 3 matrix jobs start.
• Verify timing summary appears in each job's Summary tab.
• Confirm ubuntu-latest job completes successfully as the baseline reference.
• Monitor the offline runner (monkci-ubuntu-24.04-4-3600iops) to see if it successfully joins and completes the job.
• Compare durations across the completed MonkCI runners against the baseline to identify performance gains.