Which of These Has a Faster Flutter Build Time: M1 Mini, Mac Pro, and Mac Mini

M1 machines are astonishingly fast! For iOS builds (with caching), we see build time improvements of compared with the Mac Pros. TL;DR: ~50% CI/CD with M1 machines In November 2020, Apple released the M1 MacBook and, one year later, the M1 Pro/Max chips. Since then, we have all read and heard from other people about the crazy performance improvements. Perhaps you have already read the by Jameson Williams (a staff software engineer at Reddit): tweet We know that M1 machines are fast, but To help answer that question, we for iOS and macOS builds with . should we use them in CI/CD to speed up our pipeline? compared the M1 mini, Mac Pro, and Mac mini Codemagic In this article, we’ll give you the facts and figures you need to decide if an upgrade is worth it. Comparison setup Let’s talk about the setup of this comparison and take a look at questions like: Which apps have been used for the builds? Which platforms? Release, debug, or profiling mode? Apps To compare the builds of the Flutter apps, we used two apps: The default for Flutter Counter app — an school planner that students, parents, and teachers can use to organize together. Sharezone open-source In comparison, we focus more on the Sharezone app because Sharezone is a real production app with . It uses a bunch of dependencies, like many of the packages and several other ones (Sharezone is open source — you can find all the dependencies ). Therefore, you will see . +300,000 registered users Firebase here very realistic build times Platforms We are focusing on the following: iOS macOS Tests (units and widget tests) System We are using Codemagic’s virtual machines for the test, which you can use for CI/CD. These machines have the following configuration: Mac Mini: 2,3GHz Quad Core / 8 GB Mac Pro: 3.7GHz Quad Core / 32 GB M1 Mini: 3.2 Quad Core / 8 GB Flutter Configuration Flutter version that we used is 2.10.5 To get a more realistic view, all builds use the of Flutter. release mode For the tests, we just used the command. flutter test Dependency caching We compared the builds and caching. For caching, we cached the following paths: without with Dart cache: $FLUTTER_ROOT/.pub-cache CocoaPods cache: HOME/Library/Caches/CocoaPods For more information on how to use caching in Codemagic, just take a look at the documentation on . dependency caching Accuracy We ran . For example, the later build time for the iOS Counter app is the average time of three builds. every build three times and calculated the average In total, we ran . You can also take a look at this , which shows all the raw data and links to the builds. 54 builds spreadsheet Results of comparing M1 Mini vs Mac Pro vs Mac Mini We are coming to the central part of this article: the results. You will see how big the difference is in terms of build time between the Counter and the Sharezone apps. Therefore, it’s essential to use a real app for comparisons like this. All build times are measured in seconds. Counter app results Platform Mac mini Mac Pro M1 mini iOS 92 75 30 macOS 89 51 25 Sharezone app results iOS Caching Mac mini Mac Pro M1 mini No 967 658 395 Yes 892 598 281 The results are incredible! The M1 machines reduce build times (with caching) by compared with the Mac mini and compared with the Mac Pro. 68% 53% macOS Caching Mac mini Mac Pro M1 mini No 479 466 433 Yes 501 401 333 On macOS, we don’t see as huge of improvements compared with the iOS builds, but the M1 builds (with caching) are still 34% faster than the Mac mini builds and 17% faster than the Mac Pro builds. Unit and widget tests Mac mini Mac Pro M1 mini 84 90 95 When comparing the machines in terms of unit and widget tests, we see nearly no differences between them. Sharezone has 238 unit and widget tests Overall Summary To sum up the results: The , and their results are especially interesting when it comes to integration tests. We all know that slow CI pipelines suck. M1 machines are nearly 50% faster than the Mac Pro machines However, not only will M1 machines reduce the build times of your integration tests, but they are also the way to go if you want to publish your apps on the App Store or Play Store. ! Get started with Codemagic and M1 machines Also published by , the co-founder of Sharezone. here Nils Reichardt