Solving Queue Time Bottlenecks in GitHub Actions

Saurav Aggarwal
3 min readJul 7, 2024

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In GitHub repositories, particularly in mono repo setups, managing GitHub Actions can present significant challenges, especially concerning queue time.

Bottleneck Effect

A primary issue is the bottleneck effect, where multiple projects within a single repository simultaneously trigger CI/CD pipelines. This simultaneous triggering leads to a backlog of queued jobs.

Workflow Execution Delays

This congestion delays the execution of individual workflows, increasing the overall time required to deliver updates and features.

Overwhelmed Infrastructure Resources

Additionally, the shared infrastructure resources can become overwhelmed, resulting in slower performance and longer feedback loops for developers.

Impact on Productivity

These delays hinder productivity and can complicate the management of concurrent development streams, making it difficult to maintain efficient and timely deployment processes. Streamline Your Workflow with Check History Action

In the dynamic world of software development, ensuring efficient and precise workflow management is crucial. The **Check History Action** is a versatile GitHub Action designed to enhance your development process by executing jobs based on file changes. This tool simplifies decision-making by determining whether certain jobs should run, based on changes in specific files as defined by user-provided patterns. Here’s how this action can revolutionize your workflow.

Benefits of Check History Action

Optimize Workflow

By running only the necessary jobs based on file changes, the Check History Action helps save time and resources. This ensures that your continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is more efficient and less wasteful.

Enhance Precision

The action uses pattern matching to identify relevant changes in files. This means that jobs are executed only when specific, pre-defined files are modified, ensuring that your workflow is highly targeted and precise.

Automate Decision-Making

One of the significant advantages of the Check History Action is its ability to automate the decision-making process for running jobs. This reduces manual intervention, streamlining your development process and allowing your team to focus on more critical tasks.

How It Works

The Check History Action performs the following steps:

1. Extract Last Successful Run: It retrieves the `sha` of the last successful run of a specified job.
2. Compare with Latest Commit: It compares this `sha` with the latest commit in your repository.
3. Identify Changed Files: It identifies which files have changed between these two points.
4. Pattern Matching: It matches these changed files against user-provided patterns.
5. Determine Job Execution: If any of the changed files match the patterns, it returns true, indicating that the job should run. If no matches are found, it returns false.

Easy Configuration

You can configure the Check History Action either by providing inputs directly within your workflow file or through a separate configuration file. This flexibility allows you to set up the action in a way that best fits your project’s needs.

Usage Example

Integrating the Check History Action into your workflow is straightforward. Here’s a basic example of how you can set it up in your GitHub repository by going through the readme.

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Saurav Aggarwal
Saurav Aggarwal

Written by Saurav Aggarwal

Just a curious dev who writes when gets bored of work life

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