Project Assigner GitHub action can take a very long time to run (up to 12 hours)

[nkammah]

We recently run out of GH actions minutes - while looking at the breakdown of the actions, I spotted a few instances run of the project-assigner action taking up to 12 hours to run:

I just wanted to flag it as GH actions are limited and when we reach the limites, workflows stop working.

cc @jportner @richkuz

[richkuz]

I chose a recent project-assigner GitHub action at random from the Cloud repo to diagnose.

https://github.com/elastic/cloud/runs/6004970919?check_suite_focus=true

The action took 1s to set up, < 1s to run.

GitHub reports the total duration summary as 16s, billable time 1m.

Side note: Does GitHub really round up each action to 1 minute? 😬 💸

The underlying project-assigner action code for the cloud repo is configured to run the old elastic/github-actions/project-assigner@v2.0.0 action, not the new GitHub projects beta action. That's fine.

It is also correctly configured to only run when an issue is labeled, reducing most unnecessary runs:

on:
  issues:
    types: [labeled, unlabeled]

[richkuz]

I glanced at a few github actions run on Cloud on 2022-01-23, when the action consumed 760 total minutes. I don't see any unusually long runs. I do however see a pretty high volume of issues created around that time:
2022-01-23 - 49 issues opened
2022-01-24 - 148 issues opened
Many issues are prefixed with e.g. [AZURE Brazilsouth] or [AZURE Centralindia], perhaps generated by an automated process?

Each issue is labeled 4 times, which runs the action 4 times. If GH rounds up each action to 1 minute, then: (148+49)*4=788 minutes. Pretty close to the billed amount on 2022-01-23.

Working as ... designed?

[nkammah]

Each issue is labeled 4 times, which runs the action 4 times.

Is there any workaround this - of batch grouping updates?

[Ikuni17]

GH classic projects were sunset in April 2025. This action no longer works and will also be sunset.