Test-infra: Tide context status is missing from PRs

[neolit123]

What happened:
this PR is missing the GitHub CI status at the bottom - test jobs / CLA / tide:
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/74933

[neolit123]

/sig testing
/priority critical-urgent

[spiffxp]

Also apparently missing, this PR I just opened right now! https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/pull/11629

[spiffxp]

First report received in #sig-testing was https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/74721

[spiffxp]

/assign @amwat
as test-infra oncall per go.k8s.io/oncall

[spiffxp]

/milestone v1.14

[spiffxp]

Well, my PR merged once it got the appropriate labels at least: https://github.com/kubernetes/test-infra/pull/11629

[stevekuznetsov]

Yeah, status is user-facing only, won't affect tide actually merging

[spiffxp]

All three linked PR's now have tide status contexts, I don't think any corrective action has been taken, I'm now wondering if this is github instability (I definitely caught githubstatus.com looking degraded but they never opened an incident and it all looks green now)

[spiffxp]

Also worth noting: the PR's weren't "in the merge pool" when they were missing their contexts before. They have since had the appropriate labels applied etc, and the tide status context appeared as "in merge pool"

[spiffxp]

/remove-priority critical-urgent
/priority important-soon
I'm dropping priority as all linked PR's no longer exhibit the problem, and tide has been merging PR's just fine https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/commits?author=k8s-ci-robot

I'm leaving open because I still don't know exactly what happened. I would suggest @fejta or @amwat fill in what they have found, and close if we find no further reports

[spiffxp]

/assign @fejta

[neolit123]

here is one:
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/74952

it's approved and ready to merge.
but no indication if it passes tests.

or rather, it might be passing the tests, but no overall status.

[neolit123]

here is another one:
https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/74870

the status seems to disappear on random PRs.

[amwat]

Multiple things at play here:
k/k tidepool is growing a lot as we are close to code freeze: https://prow.k8s.io/tide
tide is getting flagged by github abuse rate limits, being dicussed in testing-ops now

[stevekuznetsov]

So the context is, per GitHub's API, posted to a commit. When a PR is updated, the new commit has no contexts. The status controller is degraded right now and operating very slowly, so that is why you are noticing PRs without the status context.

[spiffxp]

What I get from the above is that we should let people know that:

• we are hitting github abuse detection for Reasons (TM)
• everything is operating as best as it can
• the tide context may not be present or up to date

My total guess, is that I can also tell people:

• https://prow.k8s.io/pr dashboard can be used to see the status of your PR (including what tide is doing with it)

[spiffxp]

Notified kubernetes-dev@

[spiffxp]

/close
This is no longer happening

[k8s-ci-robot]

@spiffxp: Closing this issue.

In response to this:

/close
This is no longer happening

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