And if you want any concurrency at all, you need 1 runner registration per concurrent job. And each runner needs its own user. And each runner requires a full and separate copy of the runner software, which is large (hundreds of megs) and self-updates.
Re:Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
by paulddraper on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @05:45PM
(#46295726)
You don't need your own user.
The rest is correct. (Though you can hardlink the installation.) And you can disable self-update, though it does it by default.
Re:Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
by gheltllck on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @09:32PM
(#46297557)
Hard-linking and running concurrent self-updates, sounds like a recipe for disaster.
Ah right, I've forgotten because I'm using a multi-user strategy and a patched version of the runner at this point anyway. The config directory for each runner is normally based on its install path (insane), something like that?
Re:Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
by paulddraper on Friday December 19, 2025 @04:47PM
(#46331328)
The config directory based on the install directory, yes.
To be fair, running multiple copies of a service isn't that common.
E.g. if you wanted to run multiple copies of PostgreSQL you can't just do a vanilla install.
I am developing a self-hosted solution for this [1]. It’s true that it’s somewhat of a pain but JIT runners allow a lot of flexibility that we don’t find elsewhere.
Re:Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
by paulddraper on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @06:48PM
(#46296370)
I did something very similar.
Create/start/stop/terminate EC2.
In my experience even with runs-on it is a bit painful with runner cancellations.
The runner configuration and registration process is unnecessarily byzantine. [1]
They can't cancel jobs cleanly. [2]
There are consistency problems everywhere. [3]
Their own documentations describes horrible things unless you use runners in JIT mode. Though JIT runners are not always removed after exit.
If there is a worse self-hosted CI runner, I haven't yet met it.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/manage-runners/se...
[2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/26311
[3] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62365