How much network traffic is sent out by the runners?

[yuvalshi0]

Hi,
We recently started hosting our runners using the actions-runner-controller on our personal EKS, after a few days, we started seeing a high NAT bill (which is priced by the amount of data sent our through the Nat), I wanted to know, how much traffic does the runner trasmit? GB's? MB's?

[TingluoHuang]

it depends on what you do within your workflow job, the runner itself should not consume much network traffic.

• Do you upload lots of artifacts during your workflow?
• Do we have lots of log content generated as part of your job?
• Any other outbound communication your job tries to do?

[yuvalshi0]

We run a python job, about ~10 minutes, 10 runners , very verbose (log wise, we print the test stdout), we do use the setup-python caching, which probably uploads a large artifact (?), I see we output about ~2GB per run, does that sounds plausible ?

[pratikvasa]

we also host action runners on EKS. We isolated and checked network throughput. I ran 3 commands,

npm ci
npx playwright install chromium --with-deps
npx playwright install chrome

just running these three commands saw a 1.8GB receive and transmit on the runner.
I could not understand why runners would need to transmit so much data