Large uploads may fail with exit code 137

[stephanosio]

Problem statement

The softprops/action-gh-release action may fail silently or complete with the exit code 137 (when debug logging is enabled) when there are numerous large release assets:

##[debug]Node Action run completed with exit code 137
##[debug]Finishing: Upload release assets

The exit code 137 is likely due to the node process, in which the release action runs, being killed because of the system running out of memory.

Looking at the softprops/action-gh-release implementation, this seems to make sense because it uses the readFileSync function to read the full content of the release assets into memory (instead of using, for instance, a stream):

action-gh-release/src/github.ts

Line 131 in cd28b0f

data: readFileSync(path)

Also note that the action attempts to read all release assets into the the memory at once, making this problem much worse:

      const files = paths(config.input_files);
...
      const assets = await Promise.all(
        files.map(async path => {
          const json = await upload(

Suggested solution

The action should use Stream to read the content of the release assets.

Note that the node-fetch module supports Stream, so the file stream should be passed to it instead of an object containing the full content of the release asset loaded into it.

Additional context

Reported in zephyrproject-rtos/sdk-ng#520 (comment)

[stephanosio]

Also just noting that the GitHub Actions runner is now on Node 16, so it would be good to update the action to use it and take advantage of the improved stream support.

[kirillmorozov]

Faced the same issue when trying to upload a couple of release assets (~1.95GB in size each) from AWS EC2 instances.

Also tried @trxcllnt's fix(#252) without any luck and since I didn't have time to debug I switched to ncipollo/release-action which suited my needs.