From: Johannes Schindelin <johannes.schindelin@gmx.de>

Every once in a while I need to verify that Microsoft Git's test suite
passes for changes that are not yet meant for public consumption, and
since it was (made) too difficult to keep up a working Azure Pipeline
definition, I have to use GitHub Actions in a private GitHub repository
for that purpose.

In these tests, basically all Dockerized CI jobs fail consistently. The
symptom is something like:

  error: cannot create async thread: Resource temporarily unavailable

in the middle of a test, typically in the t5xxx-t6xxx range. The first
such error is immediately followed by plenty more of these errors, and
not a single test succeeds afterwards.

At first, I thought that maybe the massive parallelism I enjoy there is
the problem, and I thought that the cgroups limits might be shared
between the many containers that run on essentially the same physical
machine. But even reducing the matrix to just a single of those
Dockerized jobs runs into the very same problems.

The underlying reason seems to be a substantial difference in the hosted
runners that execute these Dockerized jobs: forcing the PID limit of the
container to a high number lets the jobs pass, even when running the
complete matrix of all 13 Dockerized jobs concurrently. But that's not
the only difference: The jobs seem to take a lot longer in these
containers than, say, in the containers made available to
https://github.com/git/git.

When forcing a PID limit of 64k in that private repository, the jobs
completed successfully, but they also took a lot longer, between 2x to
2.5x longer, i.e. painfully much longer. Reducing the PID limit to 16k,
the CI jobs still passed, but took an equally long amount of time.
Reducing the PID limit to 8k caused the errors to reappear.

Here are the numbers from three example runs, the first one forcing the
PID and nproc limit to 65536, the second one to 16384, the third run is
from the public git/git repository:

Job                           | 64k     | 16k     | reference
------------------------------|---------|---------|------

Submitted-As: https://lore.kernel.org/git/pull.2164.git.1782889484346.gitgitgadget@gmail.com