Based on these experiments—four parallel Windows jobs create about a 68% chance of at least one stall, versus roughly 25% with one job. So testing Windows on just one PHP version instead of four reduces exposure. These failures are always random and due to GitHub’s underlying runner instability, which we can't fix.

Changes include:

• Removed IIS, FastCGI, URL Rewrite, Node, and unnecessary ACL setup (no longer needed since not running functional tests).
• Removed the ineffective Windows pcntl request.
• Replaced three same-runner retries with a native 10-minute test timeout (all this did was make stalled tests run for 50 minutes).
• Added a 20-minute job timeout.
• Added PostgreSQL 60-second statement and 30-second lock timeouts.
• Reduced Windows testing to just PHP 8.2, the minimum requirement for phpBB (all the other mysql tests handle the later PHP versions)
• Isolated functional tests from unit tests and added a PHP-FPM safeguard to recycle after 100 HTTP requests, clearing accumulated state and resources throughout the functional suite.