I had similar problems with CircleCI and it’s docker executor. We recently switched to GitHub actions and the following led to huge improvements: - much faster

I had similar problems with CircleCI and it’s docker executor. We recently switched to GitHub actions and the following led to huge improvements: - much faster network speeds. - We no longer run on the docker executor. Instead we run on Ubuntu. These boot in a second or 2 pretty consistently. - the bulk of our test suite was able to be pulled out of docker entirely (a lot of jest, and PHPUnit tests). - we have a bigger suite of E2E PHPUnit tests that we spin up a whole docker compose stack for. These are slower but still manageable. Parallelism is key in all of this too. Our backend test suite has a full execution time of something like 250 minutes, but we just split it over a bunch of small workers and the whole thing completes in about 8 minutes.