Observed this again now. There were 6 trybot runs at https://farmer.golang.org/#trybots just now, and they were stuck at "Builds remaining: 0" for at least 5-10 minutes. Afterwards, most of them completed.

I was tailing the logs during the time and did not see anything that visibly stood out as a problem.

The trybot run at https://farmer.golang.org/try?commit=f1347265 is still active at this moment despite having "Builds remaining: 0" for well over 10 minutes.

I think I understand this now.

TryBot completion happens as part of a loop inside findTryWork. This is why TryBots take at least a few seconds after reaching 0 builds left, and why when findTryWork was broken in #43312 try weren't completing.

In the case of https://farmer.golang.org/try?commit=f1347265, it was an unfortunate race condition involving these steps:

1. the trybot run reached 0 builds left,
2. it posted a trybot-result vote (but wasn't removed as an active trybot yet)
3. I removed the trybot-result vote (coordinator still hasn't removed it as an active trybot)
4. by the time it would be removed in the findTryWork loop, it stopped meeting the condition for a "finished run" because the trybot-result vote was missing.

Relevant code is coordinator.go#L1093-L1098.

In conclusion:

1. The original problem observed on Dec 22 is completely related to x/build/cmd/coordinator: failing to find TryBot work because it cannot handle multiple CLs with same Change-Id #43312; it's not a problem otherwise.
2. The problem observed on Mar 2 is due to me removing TryBot-Result vote "too quickly", without giving coordinator a chance to mark the trybot run as complete. A workaround is to also remove the TryBot-Run vote, wait a minute for the run to get cancelled, then restart it.

The fix is to improve the trybot completing logic by either factoring it out of the findTryWork loop, or otherwise at least adding a check and cancel even if ts.wantedAsOf == now when the number of builds remaining is non-positive.