---
title: "Bound stalled transfers and retry them"
description: "Linear replaced its checkout step with a composite action that retries with backoff and aborts a stalled transfer after about 30 seconds."
url: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/resilient-checkout
canonicalUrl: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/resilient-checkout
---

# Bound stalled transfers and retry them

Linear replaced its checkout step with a composite action that retries with backoff and aborts a stalled transfer after about 30 seconds.

## How to choose an approach

This technique currently has one documented company example. Validate its prerequisites, tradeoffs and original CI environment against your repository before adapting it.

- **[Linear](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/linear#resilient-checkout)**: Use it when Checkout tail latency is repeatedly stalling a critical-path job. Check before adopting: Pair every abort with a retry, so a stalled transfer starts again. A persistent mirror is provider-specific.

## Apply this technique

````text
Evaluate and apply this CI technique to my repository: Bound stalled transfers and retry them.

Linear replaced its checkout step with a composite action that retries with backoff and aborts a stalled transfer after about 30 seconds.

Read the technique and its source-backed company examples: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/resilient-checkout.md

Inspect this repository’s CI workflows, build and test commands, dependencies, and recent run timings. Identify where this technique applies and explain the expected benefit using this repository’s evidence.
Measure a baseline from recent comparable runs: elapsed time, queue time, runner minutes and failures where available. If data is unavailable, say what cannot be measured.
Compare relevant company approaches, checking prerequisites, platform differences and tradeoffs. Rank applicable options by evidence, fit and measurable opportunity; do not present company results as predictions for this repo.
Recommend the smallest safe change, show what checks and fallback paths remain, and ASK ME WHICH CHANGE TO APPROVE BEFORE EDITING ANY FILES.
Only after approval, work on a new feature branch, make one reversible change, and open a reviewable pull request. Never merge or push to a default or protected branch.
Keep required checks, test coverage, deployment and release behavior intact. Validate the change and compare equivalent runs where possible; report limitations and what should be monitored after merge.
````

## How Linear used this technique

Read what Linear changed and follow the original sources.

### Linear: Bound stalled transfers and retry them

Linear replaced its checkout step with a composite action that retries with backoff, sets GIT_HTTP_LOW_SPEED_LIMIT and GIT_HTTP_LOW_SPEED_TIME so a stalled connection aborts after about 30 seconds, and uses a checkout cache that keeps a persistent git mirror on a sticky disk. The runner provider traced the hangs to intermittent degradation on its network link to GitHub.

Evidence: Documented technique

Use it when: Checkout tail latency is repeatedly stalling a critical-path job.

Before applying it: Pair every abort with a retry, so a stalled transfer starts again. A persistent mirror is provider-specific.

[Read more in the Linear playbook](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/linear#resilient-checkout)

[Primary source](https://linear.app/now/ci-bottleneck-reworked#make-checkout-more-resilient)

## CI optimization is continuous work.

Apply this technique yourself, or use StarSling Runners for faster GitHub Actions and optional agent-driven optimization PRs, which teams on eligible paid plans can turn on.

[Get self-improving CI](https://starsling.dev/products/runners)

## Company Playbooks

### [Anthropic](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/anthropic)

Run only affected tests

### [DoorDash](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/doordash)

Run build and test in parallel, sharded across CI agents

### [Linear](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/linear)

Benchmark the same job on faster hardware

### [Mastra](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/mastra)

StarSling runners for the slowest test workflow

### [OpenAI](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/openai)

Rank CI fixes by the minutes they save

### [Ramp](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/ramp)

Move a CPU-bound test suite to a faster CPU

### [Shopify](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/shopify)

Let an agent iterate against one CI metric

### [Spotify](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/spotify)

Build arm64 on native arm64 runners

### [Stripe](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/stripe)

Run only the tests a change can reach

### [Uber](https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/uber)

Build the merge-queue speculations most likely to be needed

## Related guides

Implementation guides for this technique.

### [Bound GitHub Actions runner jobs with timeout-minutes](https://starsling.dev/best-practices/github-actions/bound-job-timeouts)

Set timeout-minutes on GitHub Actions runner jobs so a hung job is killed fast instead of burning up to the 360-minute default. Copyable YAML.