Bitbucket runners don't share tasks

[Alexey Bulenkov]

Hi. I have to self-hosted runners with equal tags. But tasks run always only on last instance. I often see than pipelines stay in queue and don't see any activity on first instance.

Does bitbucket support the distribution of tasks to free runners?

[Ben]

Hey Alexey,

Yes - builds will automatically execute on runners when they are considered "free" and no other jobs are running on them. This allows for redundancy.

There is a bug at present that is causing builds to not become unassigned from runners, and therefore these are considered "busy" and will not accept further jobs.

This is under investigation with a high priority with our developers, you can "Watch" this issue for future updates:
https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-22300

In the meantime, I would suggest deleting and re-adding the runner where jobs are not executing - this will allow new builds to run on this runner.

Cheers!

- Ben (Bitbucket Cloud Support)

[Alexey Bulenkov]

@Ben seems it's not our bug. We have auto-update script, which pulled new image of bitbucket-runner and reload docker container every night. But we have same problems - to much queue jobs and activity only on one runner.

[Ben]

Hi Alexey,

You will need to ensure each runner has the same tag present and this tag is referenced in the bitbucket-pipelines.yml - when Bitbucket Cloud pipelines looks for runners to execute on it will try any of the non-busy runners with these tags present.

For example if two runners have the following tags:

self-hosted, linux

When calling the runner, the bitbucket-pipelines yml will need to have both tags listed - it should then recognise that multiple runners are present with these tags and therefore both can have the build step executed on them.

Again, if you have already ensured the above is implemented - and one of your runners is still not being used - you will need to delete and re-add it so that the job queue is cleared, and builds may execute on it due to the bug I mentioned previously.

Cheers!

- Ben (Bitbucket Cloud Support)