Openclaw CI Limits

OpenClaw CI Limits

Use this skill for CI capacity changes, not ordinary test failure triage. The goal is to keep OpenClaw fast while distinguishing runner registration, runner availability, Blacksmith control-plane health, and downstream queue drains.

Core Facts

• Do not assume the scarce resource. Prove whether pressure is runner registrations, eligible runner availability, Blacksmith capacity/control plane, workflow dependencies, test runtime, or a downstream queue writer.
• GitHub runner registrations for openclaw currently report a 10,000 per 5-minute bucket in actions_runner_registration. Verify the live bucket before each tuning pass because GitHub can change it. The openclaw organization shares one bucket.
• Core REST quota does not draw down this bucket. Check actions_runner_registration separately; core quota can be healthy while runner registration is throttled.
• Use about 60% of the live bucket as the operating target. With the current 10,000-registration bucket, keep planned Blacksmith burst load under 6,000 registrations per 5 minutes and leave the rest for other repos, retries, and burst overlap.
• Jobs that route, notify, summarize, choose shards, or run short CodeQL quality scans should stay on GitHub-hosted runners unless measured evidence says Blacksmith is required.

First Checks

Before changing CI, collect current pressure:

ghx api rate_limit --jq '{core:.resources.core,graphql:.resources.graphql,search:.resources.search,actions_runner_registration:.resources.actions_runner_registration}'
ghx run list -R openclaw/openclaw --limit 20 --json databaseId,status,conclusion,workflowName,event,headBranch,createdAt,updatedAt,url
ghx run list -R openclaw/clawsweeper --limit 20 --json databaseId,status,conclusion,workflowName,event,headBranch,createdAt,updatedAt,url
ghx api repos/openclaw/clawsweeper/actions/runs/<run-id>/jobs --paginate --jq '.jobs[] | {id,name,status,conclusion,labels,created_at,started_at,completed_at,runner_name,runner_group_name}'
blacksmith testbox list --all
curl -fsS https://clawsweeper.openclaw.ai/api/status | jq '{generated_at,fleet,diagnostics:{errors:.diagnostics.errors}}'
curl -fsS https://clawsweeper.openclaw.ai/api/exact-review-queue | jq '{generated_at,review:.lanes.review,publication:.lanes.publication,state_writer,state_append}'
node scripts/ci-run-timings.mjs --latest-main
node scripts/ci-run-timings.mjs --recent 10

For a suspicious queued run, inspect its jobs. A run-level queued status does not reveal whether the job is waiting on dependencies or has no eligible runner. Compare created_at, started_at, labels, and runner_name. Recheck stale queued runs live before canceling them; cancel only runs proven obsolete.

scripts/ci-run-timings.mjs start delay can include workflow dependency wait plus runner queue time. It is trend evidence, not runner-pressure proof alone.

Read:

• .github/workflows/ci.yml
• .github/workflows/codeql-critical-quality.yml
• docs/ci.md
• test/scripts/ci-workflow-guards.test.ts
• touched planner files under scripts/lib/*ci*, scripts/lib/*test-plan*, or scripts/ci-changed-scope.mjs

Diagnose The Bottleneck

Classify the issue before changing caps:

• Runner-registration throttle: many jobs queued before runner assignment, Blacksmith/GitHub reports 403/429 or spam-style 422 responses from generate-jitconfig, and API core quota is still healthy. Treat 422 as this signal only when the request payload is otherwise valid. Fix burstiness and Blacksmith job count.
• Blacksmith capacity: Blacksmith dashboard shows actual concurrency caps or unavailable capacity. Do not solve this with GitHub workflow fanout alone.
• Blacksmith Testbox control plane: list, warm, status, or run calls time out before a lease is returned. This is separate from Actions runner registration and Actions job capacity. Trusted source may use the documented local fallback; untrusted source stays blocked.
• Unavailable runner label: a job is queued with a custom runs-on label, started_at and runner_name remain empty, and no eligible runner exists. Restore an available hosted or registered label; fanout cannot fix it.
• Workflow dependency wait: the job is queued but required predecessors are not terminal. Fix or wait for the dependency; do not call the whole delay runner queue pressure.
• OpenClaw test runtime: jobs start quickly but one lane dominates wall time. Use $openclaw-test-performance instead of runner tuning.
• Real failing CI: one job fails after starting. Use $github:gh-fix-ci or $openclaw-testing, not this skill.
• ClawSweeper review backlog: review pending/ready grows while publication and state writers remain healthy. Tune review admission/workers in openclaw/clawsweeper.
• ClawSweeper publication backlog: publication pending/ready and oldest age grow, net drain is zero or negative, or dead letters rise. Inspect publication batches, state-writer coordination, and GitHub mutation latency first.
• State materializer/append backlog: state_append.pending_rows, pending_bytes, or oldest age grows while the materializer is queued or absent. Recover that sole drain first; more review workers make it worse.

Registration Budget Math

Estimate worst-case registrations for a change before editing:

new Blacksmith registrations ~= number of Blacksmith jobs that can become queued
inside one 5 minute window

For matrix jobs, count every row that can start in the 5-minute window. strategy.max-parallel only caps simultaneous rows; short rows can turn over and register more runners before the window resets. Use job duration, retries, and queue turnover to justify any lower estimate. Add non-matrix Blacksmith jobs such as preflight, security-fast, build-artifacts, and platform lanes.

For repeated pull-request pushes, multiply by the number of runs expected to reach Blacksmith admission in the same 5-minute window, including runs canceled after admission. Canonical main is single-flight: one run completes while GitHub's default single pending slot is replaced by the newest push. Count one active main matrix plus its next pending matrix, not every intermediate merge.

Reject a change unless the org-level worst case stays below about 60% of the live bucket. With the current 10,000-registration bucket, keep planned Blacksmith burst load under 6,000 registrations per 5 minutes with headroom for ClawSweeper, ClawHub, Clownfish, OpenClaw RTT, and Clawbench.

Safe Levers

Prefer these in order:

1. Preserve cancel-in-progress for superseded pull-request heads.
2. Preserve canonical main single-flight without canceling its running integration cycle; GitHub's default pending slot coalesces to the newest tip.
3. Move high-frequency, short, non-build jobs to ubuntu-24.04.
4. Reduce matrix rows by bundling related tests inside one runner job when the combined job stays under timeout and keeps useful failure names.
5. Lower strategy.max-parallel for bursty Blacksmith matrices.
6. Right-size runners from timing evidence. Use fewer/larger jobs only when elapsed time improves enough to justify registration count.
7. Split truly slow tests with $openclaw-test-performance; do not hide a slow test problem by registering more runners.

Do not:

• add another Blacksmith installation expecting a higher registration bucket;
• move CodeQL Critical Quality back to Blacksmith;
• raise all max-parallel values at once;
• make manual workflow_dispatch runs cancel normal push/PR validation;
• delete coverage just to reduce runner count;
• treat cancelled superseded pull-request runs as failures without checking the newest run for the same ref.
• cancel old queued runs from a stale snapshot; re-query the exact run first and preserve any current run that still owns live work.

Current OpenClaw Knobs

These are intentionally guarded by test/scripts/ci-workflow-guards.test.ts:

• CI concurrency key version, PR cancellation, and non-canceling canonical main single-flight with one coalesced pending tip.
• preflight and hosted security-fast start immediately without a debounce or standalone admission job. On Node-relevant canonical main pushes, preflight also owns the sole dependency sticky-disk write and 8 GiB prune before fanout; replacement visibility is proved only by a later exact-marker restore because Blacksmith snapshot promotion can lag job completion.
• CI matrix caps: fast/check lanes at 12, Node test shards at 28, Windows and Android at 2.
• Canonical PR Node tests use one precise changed-target job when possible; broad, deleted, unknown, or planner-failed changes fall back to the 14-job compact full-suite plan. Targeted plans retain the full built-artifact boundary gate. main, manual, and release runs stay full.
• build-artifacts on blacksmith-16vcpu-ubuntu-2404.
• lower-weight Node/check shards on blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2404.
• heavy retained Linux/Android shards on blacksmith-8vcpu-ubuntu-2404.
• CodeQL Critical Quality on ubuntu-24.04 with no blacksmith- labels.
• Vitest/test compile caches are restore-only in CI and use immutable Actions caches; the daily/dispatch warmer is their sole writer. Build compile cache writes rotate at most once per UTC day. PRs create no runtime-cache archives.

When changing one knob, update docs/ci.md and the guard test in the same PR.

Validation

For workflow-only or docs/skill-only changes in a Codex worktree:

node scripts/run-vitest.mjs test/scripts/ci-workflow-guards.test.ts
node scripts/check-workflows.mjs
node scripts/docs-list.js
./node_modules/.bin/oxfmt --check .github/workflows/ci.yml .github/workflows/codeql-critical-quality.yml docs/ci.md test/scripts/ci-workflow-guards.test.ts .agents/skills/openclaw-ci-limits/SKILL.md .agents/skills/openclaw-ci-limits/agents/openai.yaml
git diff --check

If pnpm docs:list tries to reconcile dependencies in a linked Codex worktree, stop and use node scripts/docs-list.js.

For a PR before requesting maintainer approval:

.agents/skills/autoreview/scripts/autoreview --mode branch --base origin/main
ghx pr checks <pr> -R openclaw/openclaw --watch --interval 15

Use hosted exact-head gates for CI workflow tuning. Do not burn local pnpm test on unrelated full-suite proof.

Only after the maintainer explicitly asks you to prepare or land the PR, run the repo-native mutating wrapper:

scripts/pr review-init <pr>
scripts/pr review-artifacts-init <pr>
scripts/pr review-validate-artifacts <pr>
OPENCLAW_TESTBOX=1 scripts/pr prepare-run <pr>

prepare-run can push a prepared commit to the PR branch. Only run scripts/pr merge-run <pr> after the maintainer has explicitly asked you to land the PR. Both commands mutate GitHub state.

Post-Land Monitoring

After merge, watch at least one fresh main cycle and the adjacent repos:

ghx run list -R openclaw/openclaw --limit 20 --json databaseId,status,conclusion,workflowName,event,headBranch,createdAt,updatedAt,url
for repo in openclaw/clawsweeper openclaw/clawhub openclaw/clownfish openclaw/openclaw-rtt openclaw/clawbench; do
  ghx run list -R "$repo" --limit 12 --json databaseId,status,conclusion,workflowName,event,headBranch,createdAt,updatedAt,url
done
curl -fsS https://clawsweeper.openclaw.ai/api/exact-review-queue | jq '.'

Report:

• exact PR/commit landed;
• expected registration reduction or added headroom;
• CI run status and slowest/queued jobs;
• queued job labels, runner assignment, and dependency state for any outlier;
• Blacksmith Actions runner evidence separately from Testbox control-plane health;
• ClawSweeper queue pending, dispatching, leased, oldest pending age;
• publication net drain/dead letters, state-writer queued/waiting, and state append rows/bytes/oldest item;
• any real failures that remain outside runner registration.