For my current work project, caching was actually slower than just doing fresh resource installs... I don't know if Github has some transparent caching proxies for npm, nuget, etc, but they run faster than the cache save/restore does.
We're using the github hosted runners for pull requests and builds... the build process with build and attach .zip files into a release and the deploy process runs on self-hosted runners on the target server(s). Tests for PRs takes about 2-4min depending on how long it takes to queue the job. Build/Bundling takes about 3-5 minutes. The final deploys are under a minute.
The biggest thing for me is to stay as hands off from the deployed servers as possible. Having done a lot of govt and banking work, it's just something I work pretty hard to separate myself from. Automating all the things and staying as hands off as I can. Currently doing direct deploys, but would rather be deploying containers.
my setup before was just build and scp
now it takes like 3 mins for a deploy: i haven’t setup caching for builds etc. but that feels like a self made problem
my proj is pretty simple so thats probably why