Test caching to improve workflow performance

[james-garriss]

💡 Summary

Probably the most time-consuming part of any workflow is waiting for ScubaGear to initialize. Caching is probably the best solution for this problem, and GitHub's caches were designed specifically with dependencies in mind. I have explored the use of caching with the restore-use-cache paradigm already (https://github.com/cisagov/ScubaGear/blob/test-caching-for-workflows/.github/workflows/test_caching.yaml), and it seems to work.

This issue would be to take this paradigm and apply it to the simplest workflow possible that initializes (maybe smoke tests, maybe workflow pipeline).

Motivation and context

Workflows that initialize are slow. The workflow pipeline takes 12 minutes, and around 8 of those are just initializing. If this caching works, it would significantly improve performance and reduce wait times.

Implementation notes

Please provide details for implementation, such as:

• Select a workflow w initialization.
• Modify it to use new paradigm.
• Run it, run it, run it, and then run it some more.
• Determine if it works.
• Determine if it's faster.

Acceptance criteria

How do we know when this work is done?

• It works.
• It's faster.

NOTE: Follow on tasking would be to create issues for each of the remaining workflows that should use this same concept.