CI Pipeline Optimization Analysis

[gkorland]

CI Pipeline Optimization Analysis (Staging Branch)

The Playwright Tests workflow is the critical path at ~10 min per shard (2 shards, ~20 min billable). The Build workflow runs ~1 min but wastes 55% of its time on unused steps.

Sub-issues

#	Task	Estimated savings	Effort
1	#551 — Cache or pre-seed FalkorDB test data	~7 min	Medium
2	#553 — Cache Playwright browsers in CI	~1.5 min	Low
3	#554 — Switch CI from pip install to uv sync	~40s	Low
4	#555 — Remove unused backend install from Build workflow	~35s	Trivial
5	#556 — Add concurrency groups to CI workflows	Variable	Trivial
6	#557 — Add npm cache to CI workflows	~10s	Trivial
7	#558 — Add Docker layer caching to release workflow	~2-5 min (releases)	Low
8	#559 — Deduplicate npm installs in Playwright workflow	~5s	Low

Total potential savings: ~9-10 min per CI run, bringing Playwright from ~10 min/shard down to ~4-5 min/shard.

The single biggest win is pre-seeding FalkorDB data (#551) — it alone accounts for 37% of the Playwright workflow runtime.