30% of runner instantiation failes due to timeout

Run machulav/ec2-github-runner@v2
GitHub Registration Token is received
AWS EC2 instance i-0eeae9ef28dcd04e9 is started
AWS EC2 instance i-0eeae9ef28dcd04e9 is up and running
Waiting 30s for the AWS EC2 instance to be registered in GitHub as a new self-hosted runner
Checking every 10s if the GitHub self-hosted runner is registered
Checking...
.
.
.
Checking...
Error: GitHub self-hosted runner registration error
Checking...
Error: A timeout of 5 minutes is exceeded. Your AWS EC2 instance was not able to register itself in GitHub as a new self-hosted runner.

this is the error i receive for like 30% of my runners what could cause this? and how can i increase the percentage of successfull instantiations?

[farvour]

I ran into this issue when previous runners didn’t clean themselves up in the GitHub API and I look at the cloud-init log of the configure command it was asking if I wanted to replace the previous runner:

https://github.com/actions/runner/blob/main/src/Runner.Listener/CommandSettings.cs#L193

Edit: I followed up here and it seems one can pass in --replace to the config.sh script. I could fork and cut a PR for this, but was wondering if it should be flaggable since it shouldn’t normally happen on a clean stop of the instance (which sometimes isn’t guaranteed).

Jun 24 20:41:24 ip-10-x-0-61 cloud-init[2458]: This runner will have the following labels: 'self-hosted', 'Linux', 'X64'
Jun 24 20:41:24 ip-10-x-0-61 cloud-init[2458]: Enter any additional labels (ex. label-1,label-2): [press Enter to skip]```

[davegravy]

We’re also experiencing this, requiring periodic manual re-run of our CI jobs.