Bitbucket Pipelines: "Seems like you're running a lot of pipelines at the same time" error message

Summary

Sometimes, users might come across the following error message on their Pipelines builds:

Solution

Environment

Bitbucket Pipelines

Causes

There are two possible causes for this problem:

Too many references on the same push

Pipelines will only trigger builds for pushes that involve more than 5 references on the same push. These can include tags, bookmarks and branches on the same push.

Solution: If you are pushing more than 5 references to Bitbucket at the same time, there is no way to have a build trigger for that push. You will need to reduce the number of references on the push by pushing it in parts.

Too many concurrent pipeline steps on the same workspace

Bitbucket Pipelines has a hard cap on the number of steps it can run in parallel in any given workspace. If you have more than 100 steps running concurrently on the same workspace, which includes parallel steps, your builds will also fail with this same error message.

Solution: Review all repositories on your workspace that are running Pipelines builds, and make sure that none of them are running an unexpected number of builds. Then, reduce the number of steps that are running at any given time on the same workspace, or reduce parallelism from builds that don't need to run steps in parallel.