The resmoke timeout self-tests contain a race condition in how the jstests notify the harness that resmoke has started running. See https://github.com/mongodb/mongo/blob/fb7e58022833f93c36e3ac5fb6b9bea2c2698050/jstests/resmoke_selftest/end2end/timeout/fixture/timeout0.js#L4 var sentinelPath = (_getEnv( "TMPDIR" ) || _getEnv( "TMP_DIR" ) || "/tmp" ) + "/timeout0.js.sentinel" ; removeFile(sentinelPath); writeFile(sentinelPath, ""); Which is run with resmoke args --repeatTests=2 and --jobs=2   This is a race condition where they may both removeFile then both writeFile, but the file already exists for the second call. This creates the symptom in the log: Error: writeFile() can only write to a file which does not yet exist which ultimately leads to the test failure. Reproducible locally if you inject a sleep() between removeFile and writeFile.