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Notes from the runner.

Benchmarks, cost write-ups, and engineering posts about running GitLab CI in production. Honest data, no marketing fluff — we ship what we measure.

May 26, 2026 · 8 min read #benchmark #gitlab #ci #hetzner

We benchmarked GitLab.com shared runners against our managed Hetzner runners. Here's the data.

Real wall-clock and per-job timings from a 13-job Symfony pipeline on GitLab.com shared vs Runsetters managed runners (€19–79/mo). One small box loses on wall-clock; two boxes reach parity. Plus the cost math that decides which you should be on — and what we found when we tested dedicated hardware.

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