The macOS release job is a 7 GB macos-14 runner #2037

The macOS release job runs on macos-14. That runner is 3 cores and 7 GB of RAM. The same fat dist link took 25 minutes on the 16 GB x86_64 Linux runner and 87 minutes on the Mac (5.3.1, 12:38:41Z to 14:05:29Z). The Linux ARM job adds 16 GB of swap because that link was killed for memory on v5.0.0. The Mac job adds none.

GitHub retires macos-14, macos-14-large and macos-14-xlarge on 2 November 2026, with brownouts through October. The 5.3.1 graph build started at 14:05Z on 12 October, inside that day's brownout (14:00Z to 00:00Z). The job has to move to macos-15 or macos-latest before 2 November. A standard macos-15 runner is the same size, so the move stops the brownouts and does not make the link faster.

A 14 GB macOS larger runner might stop the job swapping. It will not make a single-threaded fat link as cheap as the thin CI build: the warm Linux link was still 18 minutes on 16 GB. Try swap on the current runner first, the same 16 GB the ARM job already uses, and record whether the 87 minutes was swap. Only then decide whether a larger runner is worth its per-minute price.

Done when the release job is off macos-14, and there is a timing for the Mac dist link with enough memory that it is not swapping.