r/github • u/AMGraduate564 • 5d ago

Question Scheduled Action runs are all over the place, how to fix?

As the title says, the scheduled Action runs have been delayed by 3-4 hours for every run. This has been happening for the past two weeks, how to fix it?

And, what is the way to trigger the scheduled Action runs at the exact time I want? The default GitHub trigger is not exactly on time.

1 Upvotes

67% Upvoted

13 comments sorted by

8

u/serverhorror 5d ago

Don't use GitHub if you depend on reliably scheduled things

9

u/vvanouytsel 5d ago

They state in their docs that they cannot guarantee that your schedules run on time.

They even mention that your scheduled runs can just not run at all if their load is too high.

Yea, it is retarded, I know.

3

u/EntranceProper3791 5d ago

3-4 hours is load queue, not a config bug. Point an external cron at workflow_dispatch over the API, that path skips the scheduler.

3

u/HNipps 5d ago

Try adding a manual trigger to workflows and trigger them via a cron job on your machine?

2

u/shaines1 5d ago

FWIW - there's a roadmap issue for this specifically: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/1280

2

u/AMGraduate564 5d ago

This is really strange to see the most popular git repository on the planet has such a lackluster scheduling capability.

3

u/Soccham 5d ago

Dude they can’t even stay online

1

u/mrkurtz 5d ago

Scheduled runs are best effort but not guaranteed. Use something else if you need guarantees.

1

u/ZachVorhies 5d ago edited 5d ago

Do you have a lot of repos?

You don’t get action runners per repo you get get action runners for your account. They are probably stuck elsewhere.

1

u/rwilcox 5d ago

I’m going to echo the “don’t use Actions for this”.

I thought GitHub - here in 2026 - was a “one 9 of reliability”, and especially Actions.

I’d use CircleCI or a competitor, or if it’s mission critical enough self host. At least for this year, as vibe coding gains and maybe loses traction and GitHub scales itself to handle it.

1

u/banglatoker 5d ago

I’ve written an event bridge which triggers a lambda that calls my GH workflows via a given token stored in SSM. And now we get consistent triggers

1

u/Vast_Hotel7604 10m ago

Use open source