[Donckele]

I got the email several weeks ago - and I still don’t fully understand what it means! Unbelievable confusion.

PLEASE can someone in plain english say what the limits are PER REPOSITORY? Is it 5GB per repository? can you have as many repositories as you want? I don’t care or use namespaces.

[Macha]

If you're a paying user it's 5GB per repository.

If you are not on a paid tier, all your repositories share a pool of 5GB per namespace. A namespace is basically a user or project. So if you don't use namespaces, everything is under your personal user namespace and your limit is 5GB total storage across all your repositories.

[Donckele]

So can I create multiple “namespaces” and each one can contain a repository of 5GB?

[Macha]

They need to be top level groups.

But yes, if you have public repos repoa/repoa and repob/repob instead of user/repoa and user/repob, then my understanding is both repoa and repob will hae 5GB each.

[mlegendre]

> If you're a paying user it's 5GB per repository.

TFA says 10 GB (and so does my experience).

> A namespace is basically a user or project

I believe you meant to write "a user or a group".

[john_cogs]

Apologies for the confusion. I'd be happy to provide some more clarity. The answer depends on which tier of GitLab you are using.

If you are using the free tier on GitLab SaaS, there will be a 5GB storage limit per top-level namespace.

Paid tiers on GitLab SaaS will have limits of 50GB for Premium and 250GB for Ultimate.

Community programs (GitLab for Open Source, GitLab for Education, and GitLab for Startups) will have the same 250GB limit as the Ultimate tier.

Self-managed users have no limit.

[arinlen]

> If you are using the free tier on GitLab SaaS, there will be a 5GB storage limit per top-level namespace.

What does this cover? Does it cover the size of a git repo? Build artifacts, both temporary and exported to packages? And what about Docker images?

Docker images concern me the most. It's terribly easy to build and use Docker images that are >100MB, and 50 of those easily go beyond 5GB. Two projects with nightly builds easily go beyond that in a month even when doing nothing at all.

[dnsmichi]

> What does this cover?

https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/#ma... provides a list of what counts towards the storage limits, and also ways to manage, reduce and cleanup storage.

> Does it cover the size of a git repo? Build artifacts, both temporary and exported to packages? And what about Docker images?

Yes, they all are storage types that add to the overall storage consumption.

> Docker images concern me the most. It's terribly easy to build and use Docker images that are >100MB, and 50 of those easily go beyond 5GB. Two projects with nightly builds easily go beyond that in a month even when doing nothing at all.

You can define container cleanup policies within the registry, matching on age, tags, etc. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/...

[moorow]

> You can define container cleanup policies within the registry, matching on age, tags, etc. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/...

Yeah, I gotta say - this is not great. Particularly given the overarching guidance on GitLab CI is "break everything up into 30 jobs", having to store containers as either an artifact or in the registry in order to pass them to sast or test jobs or w/e means that most projects are going to hit this limit instantly. Our largest work project has registry usage sitting at 800g - admittedly, we could be a lot better at cleaning up tags. But staying under 50 for the whole namespace, not even just registry, is going to incredibly difficult.

A fair while ago, we used self-hosted and swapped to SaaS because it was the same price and we didn't have to deal with upgrades etc - and we used our own CI runners anyway. Is the unspoken intention to force users like us onto self-hosted? Should we instead be using a non-GitLab registry to store this stuff?

Very long term GitLab user, very disappointed by this.

[arinlen]

> You can define container cleanup policies within the registry, matching on age, tags, etc. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/...

As a long time GitLab user, and a user who championed the adoption of GitLab by a previous employer, this is highly disappointing. This basically eliminates GitLab as a viable option to some SMEs and specially for personal projects that relied on GitLab to build Docker images and deploy them as part of the CICD pipeline.

I just checked a personal project I have hosted in GitLab that does nothing more than pulling a Docker image, do a minor tweak and deliver the image to the container registry, and the Docker image build step alone adds ~100MB to the usage quotas each time the pipeline is triggered.

I'm sorry to say, but if this plan stays as is, GitLab ceases to be an option.

[Donckele]

Thanks. 2 more questions:

- Do I have to do anything now with all my “top-level” repositories (total >5GB)?

- When I create a new repository do I have to do something else as well (create new namespace)?

[john_cogs]

The FAQ contains information on how to manage your storage which will be helpful for top-level namespace exceeding 5GB in storage: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/#ma...