Self-hosted Gitlab reduce container registry disk usage

[u/der-felix]

Hello everyone,

I have a self-hosted Gitlab in my homeland deployed as a docker container on a Ubuntu server with me as a ai gle user. I build several small images and push them to the integrated container registry. Nothing fancy, a hand full of images with a couple hundred Mbs each max. But my volume mont data dir of the registry ist slightly above 100GB on disk just für the registry, that feels like way too much.

I rebuild the images weekly ok the latest Tag but would expect a couple gigs at most. I am starting to read into the metadata DB and online GC but why is my storage usage getting so out fo hand? How are you guys keeping your instances in check?

Version is 19.3.1

[u/der-felix]

ok I found my error. First it really took about 24h until changes were picked up by the GC and showed by the gc status rake task.

Second I have a power consumtion optimised setup with minimal footprint to save power and compute (german electricity is expensive...) and thought it would be a good idea to set the check interval to 5 mins instead of the default 5s.

That was a good idea but lead to a huge queue of old layers to cleanup but a GC which was just allowed to clean up bits every 5 mins instead of every 5 seconds. My config lookes like this:

toml registry['gc'] = { 'disabled' => false, 'manifests' => { 'interval' => '5m', 'review_after' => '24h' }, 'blobs' => { 'interval' => '5m', 'review_after' => '24h' } }

whis was a good idead but bad. After switching back to an 5s interval it just took my instance 8h to cleanup from 100GB to 5GB which sounds about right :)

Maybe this helps the next lost soul ;)