How a Single beforeEach Killed Our CI for 36 Hours

Six failed CI runs. Thirty-six hours of GitHub Actions time. Every run timing out at exactly the 6-hour limit. The culprit was one line in tests/setup.js . The Setup We were building a multi-tenant platform with a PostgreSQL backend — around 76 database models handling everything from user accounts and billing to visitor logs and real-time notifications. The test suite had grown to roughly 1,140 test cases across 36 files. Standard stuff. CI ran on every PR. Tests passed locally. And then one day, CI just... never finished. The Anti-Pattern Here's what the test setup looked like: // tests/setup.js beforeEach ( async () => { const tableNames = await getTableNames (); // 76 tables await sequelize . query ( `TRUNCATE TABLE ${ tableNames . join ( ' , ' )} CASCADE;` ); }); The intent was clean isolation — every test starts with a blank slate. Reasonable in theory. Catastrophic in practice. The Math Do the multiplication: 76 tables × 1,140 tests = 86,640 TRUNCATE operations Each TRUNCATE TABLE ... CASCADE is not a cheap operation. PostgreSQL has to: Acquire exclusive locks on all referenced tables Walk the foreign key graph to find dependent tables Truncate each in dependency order Release locks With a moderately complex schema where most tables reference others (users → societies → members → invoices → payments → ...), a single TRUNCATE ... CASCADE on a central table can fan out into dozens of implicit truncations. Multiply that by 86,640 and you have a test suite that will never complete within any reasonable timeout. Why It Wasn't Caught Sooner Two reasons: 1. It used to be fast. When the suite had 50 tests and 20 tables, this pattern worked fine. 50 × 20 = 1,000 truncations — uncomfortable but survivable. Nobody noticed when the suite crossed a tipping point. 2. Local runs used a different database state. Locally, developers often ran a subset of tests with --grep or file-specific runs. The full suite was only ever run on CI, and CI was slow enough that most assumed i