Spurious file-related failures on Windows runners

[tgross35]

Description

For the past few months, the rust-lang/rust project has had a lot of spurious failures on the Windows runners. These are typically either failure to open a file (mostly from link.exe) or failure to remove a file:

• LINK : fatal error LNK1104: cannot open file ...
• error: failed to remove file ..., Access is denied (os error 5)

Example run: https://github.com/rust-lang-ci/rust/actions/runs/10537107932/job/29198090275

Is it possible that something changed that would cause this? Even if not and this is a problem with our tooling, we could use assistance debugging.

Further context, links to failed jobs, and attempts to reproduce are at rust-lang/rust#127883. Almost every PR showing up in the mentions list is from one of these failures. These errors are similar to what was reported in #4086.

Cc @ChrisDenton and @ehuss who have been working to reproduce this.

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions - Standard Runners
• GitHub Actions - Larger Runners

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 22.04
• Ubuntu 24.04
• macOS 12
• macOS 13
• macOS 13 Arm64
• macOS 14
• macOS 14 Arm64
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022

Image version and build link

Current runner version: '2.319.1'
Runner name: 'windows-2022-8core-32gb_4d2ba789d359'
Runner group name: 'Default Larger Runners'
Machine name: 'runner'
Operating System
  Microsoft Windows Server 2022
  10.0.20348
  Datacenter
Runner Image
  Image: windows-2022
  Version: 20240811.1.0
  Included Software: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/blob/win22/20240811.1/images/windows/Windows2022-Readme.md
  Image Release: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/releases/tag/win22%2F20240811.1

Is it regression?

Yes, around 2024-06-27 but the exact start is unknown. It has seemingly gotten significantly worst in the past week or so, that job has at least a 25% failure rate from this issue in the past couple of days (probably close to 50%).

Expected behavior

Accessing or removing the files should succeed.

Actual behavior

The file operations are encountering spurious failures, as linked above.

Repro steps

No known consistent reproduction.

[vidyasagarnimmagaddi]

Hi @tgross35 ,Thank you for bringing this issue to us. We are looking into this issue and will update you on this issue after investigating.

[tgross35]

Thank you for the response. If you need to watch active jobs there is always one running at https://github.com/rust-lang-ci/rust/actions (mostly the auto branch). x86_64-msvc-ext dist-x86_64-msvc-alt dist-x86_64-msvc all fail commonly, usually between 1 and 2 hours of job start. -ext seems to be the most common failure.

There are also ongoing experiments to run the jobs multiple time with different tweaks and see what fails, e.g. rust-lang/rust#129504 and rust-lang/rust#129522.

[tgross35]

@vidyasagarnimmagaddi is there something we could do to debug this better? Our failure rate is currently over 50% due to this issue.

Somebody was able to confirm that we encounter this issue even running CI on an older state of our repo (from before this problem was noticed), which does seem to indicate it is caused by a change to the runner environment rather than changes to our code.

[ijunaidm]

@tgross35 - sure, we will update you shortly to provide workaround/solution to the issue.

[ehuss]

@ijunaidm Thanks! I'm one of the people working on this on the Rust side. Another data point: I've never been able to reproduce this on the windows-2022 runner. I've only been able to do it on the windows-2022-8core-32gb runner. I don't know if that is just because of performance (windows-2022 might be too slow to trip whatever race condition), or if it is fundamental to differences in the image. One thing I noticed is that windows-2022-8core-32gb uses the C: drive whereas windows-2022 uses the D: drive. I'm not sure if that is relevant at all.

[tgross35]

@ijunaidm are there any updates here, or are you able to help us debug in some way (e.g. provide a way to ssh into active runners)? We were forced to switch to the small runners which seems to make this issue less prevalent (still very common) but need to move back to the large runners at some point.

[ijunaidm]

@tgross35 - Sorry, i will update you shortly on this issue.