Self hosted runners for GitHub actions fail very often on

Very often, the self-hosted runners fail with this message:

The self-hosted runner: Airflow Runner 32 lost communication with the server. 
Verify the machine is running and has a healthy network connection. 
Anything in your workflow that terminates the runner process, starves it for CPU/Memory, 
or blocks its network access can cause this error. | 

Example failure: https://github.com/apache/airflow/actions/runs/584691417

It happened basically every time (and in many cases more than once) over the last few pushes I’ve done.

I think we need to get to the root cause of it - I suspect this might have something to do with scaling in/out the runners.

Happy to help solving it - I just need to have access to logs @ashb 😃.

[potiuk]

It works much better now! Thanks ! Closing it.

[ashb]

I have been working on this slowly - my hypothesis is it’s a race condition: when the runner is busy it is protected from scale in, it finishes, gets un-protected from scale in, AWS starts terminating it, but before the instance terminates it picks up a new job. Right in time to get hard killed.

My in progress fix is to use a lifecycle hook to not get killed instantly.