Set job start timeout

My pipeline consists of very long jobs that build docker images by compiling a set of packages; all of them require ~ 3 hours on my runner. I set up my CI so that only one job can run at a time, in order to reduce the disk I/O overhead. But in this way many jobs fail, supposedly because they hit a job start timeout which seems to be bout 1h, with this message:

There has been a timeout failure or the job got stuck. Check your timeout limits or try again

I have not been able to find how to increase the job start timeout, since all the documentation I found is relative to the job duration timeout. So I’d need help with this, thanks.

• GitLab: Community Edition 12.8.1
• Runner: 11.5.1

Hello,

I have a similar issue, and found no way to change the timeout either.

But I found a workaround: you can make gitlab retry 2 times in case of failure:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/yaml/#retry

So you’ll get an effective timeout of 3 hours.

Hi sba, thanks for the suggestion. I modified my jobs with:

retry:
  max: 2
  when: stuck_or_timeout_failure

which should fix my problem.