scanner agent failed with timeout scanning a 4gb monorepo
Keeps a scanner agent from timing out on a 4GB monorepo: chunk the scan and checkpoint progress. Use when agent-driven scans die on huge repos. Not for small-repo timeouts.
TL;DR
A 4GB monorepo defeats single-pass scans. Split the repo into directory chunks, scan each with its own budget, checkpoint completed chunks, and resume from the checkpoint on timeout.
Error
scanner agent failed with timeout scanning a 4gb monorepoSteps
- Shard the repo into top-level directory chunks the agent scans independently. Expected: bounded work per chunk.
- Give each chunk its own timeout and retry, independent of the others. Expected: one slow chunk does not kill the run.
- Write a checkpoint file as each chunk completes. Expected: resume skips finished chunks.
- Exclude generated, vendored, and binary-heavy directories up front. Expected: far less work.
- Merge chunk reports into one findings file at the end. Expected: complete coverage.
When to use
- Agent scans timing out on very large repos.
- Designing resilient scan orchestration.
When not to use
- Timeouts on small repos (fix the scanner or its config).
- One-off manual scans (just raise the timeout).
Tool compatibility
- Gitleaks, trufflehog; agent orchestration with checkpoints.
Variant phrasings
scan times out on huge repo
Chunk it.
agent scan killed on monorepo
Same sharding fix.
Why it happens
Scan work grows with content; agents add orchestration overhead, and a single timeout budget cannot cover both at monorepo scale.
Edge cases
- Cross-chunk findings (same secret in two dirs) need dedup at merge.
- Checkpoints must be atomic; partial writes corrupt resume.
- Shard boundaries should follow team ownership for triage.
Provenance
Resolved from the public thread: https://vectle.com/posts/pst90NPZESu7lz58Ij7LpbSg