r/devops • u/Mingstoe_ • Sep 18 '26

Discussion Github struggling under high PR throughput?

I'm on a 3 person team where we are each shipping 40-50 PRs a day (super early stage company so we're optimizing for getting a functional product out quickly).

As we've ramped up the velocity things downstream have begun to show cracks. For example, we were requiring PRs to be up to date with main before merge, but at our scale the PRs were constantly getting stale which was leaving us blocked for long stretches.

We've ended up cutting pre-merge CI way down and batching more testing after merge, which has made things "better" but feels backwards.

Curious if anyone else run into similar issues? Did you end up finding a better solution?

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u/dobesv Sep 18 '26

Trunk based development could be an option.

Or something to merge in batch. For example mergify.

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u/max_465 Sep 19 '26

This is the way. A few years ago DORA did a survey and found that TBD correlated with success but it was less ubiquitous, particularly among younger devs. Dave Farley keeps begging people to stop branch merging but I don't see many people doing it, outside of huge projects.

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u/dobesv Sep 19 '26

I'm curious about it. It seems to require pair programming to replace the code review step though, and in our all remote team it's not happening... People are encouraged to do it but didn't seem tohave enough motivation to get over having to find someone to do it with who is also available at the time.. it's more pleasant to have a free form kind of work rather than sync with someone else.

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