The Promise and Reality of Continuous Integration Caching: An Empirical Study of Travis CI Builds

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19146v1
• Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2026 03:23:19 GMT
• Title: The Promise and Reality of Continuous Integration Caching: An Empirical Study of Travis CI Builds
• Abstract summary: Continuous Integration (CI) provides early feedback by automatically building software.<n>CI services offer caching mechanisms to speed up builds by reusing infrequently changing artifacts.<n>We analyze 513,384 builds from 1,279 GitHub projects.
• Score: 0.5951328229856059
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Continuous Integration (CI) provides early feedback by automatically building software, but long build durations can hinder developer productivity. CI services offer caching mechanisms to speed up builds by reusing infrequently changing artifacts, yet little is known about how caching is adopted in practice and what challenges it entails. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale empirical study of CI caching in Travis CI, analyzing 513,384 builds from 1,279 GitHub projects. We find that only 30% of projects adopt CI caching, and early adoption is strongly associated with project maturity, such as more dependencies, more commits, and longer CI lifespans. To understand why many projects do not adopt caching, we submitted pull requests enabling caching in non-adopting projects, and nearly half were accepted or merged. Developer feedback suggests that non- or late adoption mainly stems from limited awareness of CI caching support. We also examine cache maintenance and identify five common activities, performed by 24% of cache-enabled projects. Although one-third of projects see substantial build-time reductions, cache uploads occur in 97% of builds, and 33% of projects contain stale cached artifacts. Finally, our analysis of reported caching issues shows developers mainly struggle with corrupted or outdated caches or request broader caching features. Overall, CI caching does not help all projects, needs ongoing maintenance, and is more complex in practice than many developers expect.

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