Hi,

Reviewing the picture today, the GitHub hosted runners utilisation overall is 
still maxxing out daily. WIth respect to superset we can see over the last 7 
days that the project has dropped out of the top 5 to 7 which is good progress. 
Your continued work and vigilance on this area helps all projects and is 
appreciated.

Please note that there is now a page for sharing tips and best practice for 
optimising workflows with respect to utilisation:

https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/INFRA/GitHub+Actions+Recommended+Practices

There is also a Slack channel for community discussion and sharing ideas: 
project-workflow-optimisations

Thanks.

Kind regards,
-Bob Thomson,
ASF Infrastructure


On 2026/06/05 08:09:51 Robert Thomson wrote:
> Thanks Evan, all sounds like great work, hopefully will make a dent in the
> jobs in use.
> 
> Kind regards,
> -Bob Thomson,
> ASF Infrastructure
> 
> 
> On Thu, Jun 4, 2026 at 9:25 PM Evan Rusackas <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> > Thanks for the tips.
> >
> > For your first suggestion, we took a different route to the same goal,
> > using a change-detector action and job-level gating, which has advantages
> > for our setup, but we do use “paths:” in several workflows.
> >
> > For the second one, we are using concurrency & cancel-in-progress, so all
> > set there. However, we’re using “github.run_id” rather than “github.ref”
> > there, since on push events, run_id lets every commit to master get fully
> > validated, whereas ref would cancel in-progress master validations when
> > commits land back-to-back (happening an awful lot right now).
> >
> > All the important PRs mentioned in my last email have landed, and we’re
> > just doing touch-ups now. Hopefully the situation has drastically improved,
> > though ironically, a ton of PRs need rebasing now, so pardon the CI churn
> > while we do so with the current backlog.
> >
> > Thanks again,
> >
> > -e-
> >
> > *Evan Rusackas*
> > Preset | preset.io
> > On Jun 4, 2026 at 1:09 AM -0700, Bob Thomson <[email protected]>, wrote:
> >
> > I have been experimenting with pointing Gemini at public repos and
> > prompting:
> >
> > "Analyse the GitHub Actions workflows in this repo
> > https://github.com/apache/PROJECT/tree/master/.github and report on
> > possible causes of long run time/high number of runs of GitHub Actions"
> >
> > One output here was:
> >
> > The Problem: Changes to frontend UI files (.ts, .tsx, .less) frequently
> > trigger backend Python unit test runs, and vice versa. Unless paths are
> > explicitly managed on every configuration entry, the entire testing suite
> > runs for micro-commits affecting only one side of the stack.
> > The Fix: Workflows must feature distinct path-routing restrictions:
> >
> > And the suggestion change was:
> >
> > # For frontend workflows
> > on:
> > pull_request:
> > paths:
> > - 'superset-frontend/**'
> >
> > I am no expert on Actions or this project, but thought I'd pass it on in
> > case it is helpful.
> >
> > A second one was:
> >
> > concurrency:
> > group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.event.pull_request.number ||
> > github.ref }}
> > cancel-in-progress: true
> >
> > Which is said to ensure that, when a PR is opened and workflows are
> > running for it, and a further new commit is made to the same PR, the old
> > runs from the first commit are then cancelled - otherwise an open PR that
> > gets 3 more commits pushed, resulst in 3 lots of workflows running for the
> > one PR, 2 of which are redundant.
> >
> > Hope these are useful, or at least food for thought on other possible
> > steamlining improvements.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > -Bob Thomson
> >
> >
> > On 2026/06/03 18:22:55 Evan Rusackas wrote:
> >
> > Hi Bob (and all)
> >
> > Thanks for the heads up on this. I just opened a swath of PRs that should
> > cut this down significantly. I’m working with PMC members to
> > assess/touch-up/review/merge:
> >
> >
> > 1. This PR takes us from 6 Cypress runners down to 5, and takes
> > the /app/prefix smoke test (only running on master now) down from 2 runners
> > to 1. https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/40717
> > 2. Cypress runners were all spinning up BEFORE they checked to see if they
> > were needed. This should fix that:
> > https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/40718
> > 3. Gating E2E behind pre-commit. That's such a common failure that we
> > probably needn't test E2E until it passes. See the caveats here, there are
> > some visibility and fork-based PR caveats:
> > https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/40719
> > 4. run unit/integration tests on CURRENT python version on PRs, and full
> > version matrix (3.10-3.12) on master:
> > https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/40722
> > 5. Don't run CodeQL checks on docs-only changes:
> > https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/40724
> > 6. Cancel-in-progress on a few things that churn needlessly on every
> > commit: https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/40725
> > 7. Only build docker on docker-relevant changes:
> > https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/40723
> >
> > There’s an alternate (radical) solution of just NOT running E2E tests on
> > PRs, but only running them on master. Sure would “nip it in the bud” cost
> > wise, but has potential repercussions if we don’t keep a close eye on CI on
> > `master`
> >
> > TL;DR: We’re whittling, and will ask for fresh reports (in private ASF
> > Slack channels, probably) for impact results.
> >
> >
> > -e-
> >
> > Evan Rusackas
> > Preset | preset.io
> > On Jun 3, 2026 at 10:29 AM -0700, Bob Thomson <[email protected]>,
> > wrote:
> >
> > Fewer parallel runs is essential yes - we are at 900/900 GitHub hosted
> > runner jobs/slots just now and looking at Superset Actions we can see
> > nearly 500 completed Supeset repo action runs in the last hour, some of
> > those are up to 25 minutes in execution time, so anything that can be done
> > to reduce the share of runner jobs used by Superset is an urgent issue when
> > we are at max jobs on runners on a daily basis now.
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > -Bob Thomson,
> > ASF Infrastructure
> >
> > On 2026/05/22 19:54:16 Evan Rusackas wrote:
> >
> > Hi Bob (and everyone here),
> >
> > Thanks for the alert. The unfortunate thing is that this will only get
> > worse as we create/fix more things (security, dependabot, etc). Things only
> > seem to be ramping up.
> >
> > So, agreed, we must whittle. Cypress is the obvious killer (about half the
> > consumption). We’ll try to find ways to whittle away at this (we’re
> > migrating to Playwright, but it takes time). We might also be able to spend
> > less compute and more time by optimizing (or removing) some parallelization
> > here.
> >
> > We’re also looking at moving from dependabot for all dependency bumps (a
> > LOT of PRs) to `renovate` - which might optimize things a bit (bumping
> > dependencies in groups) but we will need to also leave dependabot in place
> > for security-driven fixes as well.
> >
> > As for Cypress tests, we have some “martixification” happening, that I
> > think we can optimize. For the Superset folks reading this, I think we can
> > split out the “app_root” tests to JUST run on merges to `master` rather
> > than every PR. That’ll save ~50% right there, we just have to keep a better
> > eye on CI on `master` (which we haven’t been great about historically, but
> > we’re getting better).
> >
> > Here’s the app_root PR https://github.com/apache/superset/pull/40385
> >
> > We can also reduce the E2E parallelization shards from 6 to… I dunno… 3 or
> > 4. That’ll save a fair bit of setup time spinning up Superset instances.
> > Tests will run a bit longer, but consume less overall. Seems like a fair
> > tradeoff.
> >
> > Open to other ideas… maybe running fewer GHA workflows in parallel, and
> > having things more sequentially to fail faster (like nothing runs until
> > pre-commit passes, for example).
> >
> > Also, least importantly, we don’t have the access to see how we stack up
> > against other projects, but I sure am curious.
> >
> > Anyone's thoughts/PRs welcomed.
> >
> > Evan Rusackas
> > Preset | preset.io
> > On May 22, 2026 at 4:46 AM -0700, Robert Thomson <[email protected]>,
> > wrote:
> >
> > Hello, Superset PMC.
> >
> > In 2024, the ASF introduced the policy for GitHub Actions usage
> > across the foundation[1]. The ASF Github shared pool of
> > Github-hosted runners has been at, or very close to the limit of
> > 900 jobs most of the time in the past few weeks and this is the
> > case again today.
> >
> > Your project has been identified as being among the top 5 consumers of
> > build time over the past 7 days and we request that you bring your
> > usage down by stream-lining long-running builds. Contact Infra for
> > a consultation if you are unable to streamline your builds further.
> >
> > You can use the infra reporting tool[2] to monitor your GHA usage as you
> > work on stream-lining, as well as locate any bottlenecks in the workflows.
> >
> > Infra will allow you two weeks time (till the 8th of June, 2026) to
> > progress this, but should you still be above the limits by then,
> > without a viable path forward, we will be limiting your GHA usage.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Bob Thomson, on behalf of ASF Infrastructure.
> >
> >
> > [1] https://infra.apache.org/github-actions-policy.html
> > [2]
> >
> > https://infra-reports.apache.org/#ghactions&project=superset&hours=24&limit=15&group=name
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 

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