GitLab application limits

GitLab, like most large applications, enforces limits within certain features to maintain a minimum quality of performance. Allowing some features to be limitless could affect security, performance, data, or could even exhaust the allocated resources for the application.

Rate limits

Rate limits can be used to improve the security and durability of GitLab.

For example, one script can make thousands of web requests per second. Whether malicious, apathetic, or just a bug, your application and infrastructure may not be able to cope with the load. Rate limits can help to mitigate these types of attacks.

Read more about configuring rate limits in the Security documentation.

Issue creation

Introduced in GitLab 12.10.

This setting limits the request rate to the issue creation endpoint.

Read more about issue creation rate limits.

  • Default rate limit: Disabled by default.

By User or IP

This setting limits the request rate per user or IP.

Read more about User and IP rate limits.

  • Default rate limit: Disabled by default.

By raw endpoint

Introduced in GitLab 12.2.

This setting limits the request rate per endpoint.

Read more about raw endpoint rate limits.

  • Default rate limit: 300 requests per project, per commit and per file path.

By protected path

This setting limits the request rate on specific paths.

GitLab rate limits the following paths by default: 

'/users/password',
'/users/sign_in',
'/api/#{API::API.version}/session.json',
'/api/#{API::API.version}/session',
'/users',
'/users/confirmation',
'/unsubscribes/',
'/import/github/personal_access_token',
'/admin/session'

Read more about protected path rate limits.

  • Default rate limit: After 10 requests, the client must wait 60 seconds before trying again.

Package Registry

Introduced in GitLab 13.12.

This setting limits the request rate on the Packages API per user or IP. For more information, see Package Registry Rate Limits.

  • Default rate limit: Disabled by default.

Import/Export

Introduced in GitLab 13.2.

This setting limits the import/export actions for groups and projects.

Limit Default (per minute per user)
Project Import 6
Project Export 6
Project Export Download 1
Group Import 6
Group Export 6
Group Export Download 1

Read more about import/export rate limits.

Rack attack

This method of rate limiting is cumbersome, but has some advantages. It allows throttling of specific paths, and is also integrated into Git and container registry requests.

Read more about the Rack Attack initializer method of setting rate limits.

  • Default rate limit: Disabled.

Member Invitations

Limit the maximum daily member invitations allowed per group hierarchy.

  • GitLab.com: Free members may invite 20 members per day.
  • Self-managed: Invites are not limited.

Webhook rate limit

Version history

Limit the number of times any given webhook can be called per minute. This only applies to project and group webhooks.

Calls over the rate limit are logged into auth.log. 

# If limits don't exist for the default plan, you can create one with:
# Plan.default.create_limits!

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(web_hook_calls: 10)

Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

  • Default rate limit: Disabled.

Enable or disable rate limiting for webhooks

Rate limiting for webhooks is under development and not ready for production use. It is deployed behind a feature flag that is disabled by default. GitLab administrators with access to the GitLab Rails console can enable it.

To enable it: 

Feature.enable(:web_hooks_rate_limit)

To disable it: 

Feature.disable(:web_hooks_rate_limit)

Gitaly concurrency limit

Clone traffic can put a large strain on your Gitaly service. To prevent such workloads from overwhelming your Gitaly server, you can set concurrency limits in Gitaly’s configuration file.

Read more about Gitaly concurrency limits.

  • Default rate limit: Disabled.

Number of comments per issue, merge request, or commit

Introduced in GitLab 12.4.

There’s a limit to the number of comments that can be submitted on an issue, merge request, or commit. When the limit is reached, system notes can still be added so that the history of events is not lost, but the user-submitted comment fails.

  • Max limit: 5,000 comments.

Size of comments and descriptions of issues, merge requests, and epics

Introduced in GitLab 12.2.

There is a limit to the size of comments and descriptions of issues, merge requests, and epics. Attempting to add a body of text larger than the limit, results in an error, and the item is also not created.

It’s possible that this limit changes to a lower number in the future.

  • Max size: ~1 million characters / ~1 MB.

Size of commit titles and descriptions

Introduced in GitLab 13.9

Commits with arbitrarily large messages may be pushed to GitLab, but when displaying commits, titles (the first line of the commit message) limits to 1KiB, and descriptions (the rest of the message) limits to 1MiB.

Number of issues in the milestone overview

Version history

The maximum number of issues loaded on the milestone overview page is 500. When the number exceeds the limit the page displays an alert and links to a paginated issue list of all issues in the milestone.

  • Limit: 500 issues.

Number of pipelines per Git push

Introduced in GitLab 11.10.

The number of pipelines that can be created in a single push is 4. This is to prevent the accidental creation of pipelines when git push --all or git push --mirror is used.

Read more in the CI documentation.

Retention of activity history

Activity history for projects and individuals’ profiles was limited to one year until GitLab 11.4 when it was extended to two years, and in GitLab 12.4 to three years.

Number of embedded metrics

Introduced in GitLab 12.7.

There is a limit when embedding metrics in GFM for performance reasons.

  • Max limit: 100 embeds.

Number of webhooks

On GitLab.com, the maximum number of webhooks and their size per project, and per group, is limited.

To set this limit for a self-managed installation, where the default is 100 project webhooks and 50 group webhooks, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

# If limits don't exist for the default plan, you can create one with:
# Plan.default.create_limits!

# For project webhooks
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(project_hooks: 200)

# For group webhooks
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(group_hooks: 100)

Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

Pull Mirroring Interval

Introduced in GitLab 13.7.

The minimum time between pull refreshes defaults to 300 seconds (5 minutes).

To change this limit for a self-managed installation, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

# If limits don't exist for the default plan, you can create one with:
# Plan.default.create_limits!

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(pull_mirror_interval_seconds: 200)

Incoming emails from auto-responders

Introduced in GitLab 12.4.

GitLab ignores all incoming emails sent from auto-responders by looking for the X-Autoreply header. Such emails don’t create comments on issues or merge requests.

Amount of data sent from Sentry through Error Tracking

Introduced in GitLab 12.6.

Sentry payloads sent to GitLab have a 1 MB maximum limit, both for security reasons and to limit memory consumption.

Max offset allowed by the REST API for offset-based pagination

Introduced in GitLab 13.0.

When using offset-based pagination in the REST API, there is a limit to the maximum requested offset into the set of results. This limit is only applied to endpoints that support keyset-based pagination. More information about pagination options can be found in the API docs section on pagination.

To set this limit for a self-managed installation, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

# If limits don't exist for the default plan, you can create one with:
# Plan.default.create_limits!

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(offset_pagination_limit: 10000)
  • Default offset pagination limit: 50000.

Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

CI/CD limits

Number of jobs in active pipelines

Introduced in GitLab 12.6.

The total number of jobs in active pipelines can be limited per project. This limit is checked each time a new pipeline is created. An active pipeline is any pipeline in one of the following states:

  • created
  • pending
  • running

If a new pipeline would cause the total number of jobs to exceed the limit, the pipeline fails with a job_activity_limit_exceeded error.

  • GitLab SaaS subscribers have different limits defined per plan, and they affect all projects under that plan.
  • On GitLab Premium self-managed or higher installations, this limit is defined under a default plan that affects all projects. This limit is disabled (0) by default.

To set this limit for a self-managed installation, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

# If limits don't exist for the default plan, you can create one with:
# Plan.default.create_limits!

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(ci_active_jobs: 500)

Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

Maximum number of deployment jobs in a pipeline

Introduced in GitLab 13.7.

You can limit the maximum number of deployment jobs in a pipeline. A deployment is any job with an environment specified. The number of deployments in a pipeline is checked at pipeline creation. Pipelines that have too many deployments fail with a deployments_limit_exceeded error.

The default limit is 500 for all GitLab self-managed and SaaS plans.

To change the limit for a self-managed installation, change the default plan’s limit with the following GitLab Rails console command: 

# If limits don't exist for the default plan, you can create one with:
# Plan.default.create_limits!

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(ci_pipeline_deployments: 500)

Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

Number of CI/CD subscriptions to a project

Introduced in GitLab 12.9.

The total number of subscriptions can be limited per project. This limit is checked each time a new subscription is created.

If a new subscription would cause the total number of subscription to exceed the limit, the subscription is considered invalid.

  • GitLab SaaS subscribers have different limits defined per plan, and they affect all projects under that plan.
  • On GitLab Premium self-managed or higher installations, this limit is defined under a default plan that affects all projects. By default, there is a limit of 2 subscriptions.

To set this limit for a self-managed installation, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(ci_project_subscriptions: 500)

Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

Number of pipeline schedules

Introduced in GitLab 12.10.

The total number of pipeline schedules can be limited per project. This limit is checked each time a new pipeline schedule is created. If a new pipeline schedule would cause the total number of pipeline schedules to exceed the limit, the pipeline schedule is not created.

GitLab SaaS subscribers have different limits defined per plan, and they affect all projects under that plan.

On GitLab Premium self-managed or higher installations, this limit is defined under a default plan that affects all projects. By default, there is a limit of 10 pipeline schedules.

To set this limit for a self-managed installation, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(ci_pipeline_schedules: 100)

Number of instance level variables

Introduced in GitLab 13.1.

The total number of instance level CI/CD variables is limited at the instance level. This limit is checked each time a new instance level variable is created. If a new variable would cause the total number of variables to exceed the limit, the new variable is created.

On self-managed instances this limit is defined for the default plan. By default, this limit is set to 25.

To update this limit to a new value on a self-managed installation, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(ci_instance_level_variables: 30)

Maximum file size per type of artifact

Introduced in GitLab 13.3.

Job artifacts defined with artifacts:reports that are uploaded by the runner are rejected if the file size exceeds the maximum file size limit. The limit is determined by comparing the project’s maximum artifact size setting with the instance limit for the given artifact type, and choosing the smaller value.

Limits are set in megabytes, so the smallest possible value that can be defined is 1 MB.

Each type of artifact has a size limit that can be set. A default of 0 means there is no limit for that specific artifact type, and the project’s maximum artifact size setting is used:

Artifact limit name Default value
ci_max_artifact_size_accessibility 0
ci_max_artifact_size_api_fuzzing 0
ci_max_artifact_size_archive 0
ci_max_artifact_size_browser_performance 0
ci_max_artifact_size_cluster_applications 0
ci_max_artifact_size_cobertura 0
ci_max_artifact_size_codequality 0
ci_max_artifact_size_container_scanning 0
ci_max_artifact_size_coverage_fuzzing 0
ci_max_artifact_size_dast 0
ci_max_artifact_size_dependency_scanning 0
ci_max_artifact_size_dotenv 0
ci_max_artifact_size_junit 0
ci_max_artifact_size_license_management 0
ci_max_artifact_size_license_scanning 0
ci_max_artifact_size_load_performance 0
ci_max_artifact_size_lsif 100 MB (Introduced at 20 MB in GitLab 13.3 and raised to 100 MB in GitLab 13.6.)
ci_max_artifact_size_metadata 0
ci_max_artifact_size_metrics_referee 0
ci_max_artifact_size_metrics 0
ci_max_artifact_size_network_referee 0
ci_max_artifact_size_performance 0
ci_max_artifact_size_requirements 0
ci_max_artifact_size_running_container_scanning 0
ci_max_artifact_size_sast 0
ci_max_artifact_size_secret_detection 0
ci_max_artifact_size_terraform 5 MB (introduced in GitLab 13.3)
ci_max_artifact_size_trace 0

For example, to set the ci_max_artifact_size_junit limit to 10 MB on a self-managed installation, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(ci_max_artifact_size_junit: 10)

Number of registered runners per scope

Introduced in GitLab 13.12.

The total number of registered runners is limited at the group and project levels. Each time a new runner is registered, GitLab checks these limits against runners that have been active in the last 3 months. A runner’s registration fails if it exceeds the limit for the scope determined by the runner registration token.

  • GitLab SaaS subscribers have different limits defined per plan, affecting all projects using that plan.

  • Self-managed GitLab Premium and Ultimate limits are defined by a default plan that affects all projects:

    Runner scope Default value
    ci_registered_group_runners 1000
    ci_registered_project_runners 1000

    To update these limits, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

      # Use ci_registered_group_runners or ci_registered_project_runners
  # depending on desired scope
  Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(ci_registered_project_runners: 100)

Instance monitoring and metrics

Incident Management inbound alert limits

Introduced in GitLab 12.5.

Limiting inbound alerts for an incident reduces the number of alerts (issues) that can be created within a period of time, which can help prevent overloading your incident responders with duplicate issues. You can reduce the volume of alerts in the following ways:

  • Max requests per period per project, 3600 seconds by default.
  • Rate limit period in seconds, 3600 seconds by default.

Prometheus Alert JSON payloads

Introduced in GitLab 12.6.

Prometheus alert payloads sent to the notify.json endpoint are limited to 1 MB in size.

Generic Alert JSON payloads

Introduced in GitLab 12.4.

Alert payloads sent to the notify.json endpoint are limited to 1 MB in size.

Metrics dashboard YAML files

Introduced in GitLab 13.2.

The memory occupied by a parsed metrics dashboard YAML file cannot exceed 1 MB.

The maximum depth of each YAML file is limited to 100. The maximum depth of a YAML file is the amount of nesting of its most nested key. Each hash and array on the path of the most nested key counts towards its depth. For example, the depth of the most nested key in the following YAML is 7: 

dashboard: 'Test dashboard'
links:
- title: Link 1
  url: https://gitlab.com
panel_groups:
- group: Group A
  priority: 1
  panels:
  - title: "Super Chart A1"
    type: "area-chart"
    y_label: "y_label"
    weight: 1
    max_value: 1
    metrics:
    - id: metric_a1
      query_range: 'query'
      unit: unit
      label: Legend Label

Environment Dashboard limits

Introduced in GitLab 13.4.

See Environment Dashboard for the maximum number of displayed projects.

Environment data on Deploy Boards

Deploy Boards load information from Kubernetes about Pods and Deployments. However, data over 10 MB for a certain environment read from Kubernetes won’t be shown.

Merge requests

Diff limits

GitLab has limits around:

An upper and lower limit applies to each of these:

  • The number of changed files.
  • The number of changed lines.
  • The cumulative size of the changes displayed.

The lower limits result in additional diffs being collapsed. The higher limits prevent any more changes from rendering. For more information about these limits, read the development documentation.

Merge request reports size limit

Reports that go over the 20 MB limit won’t be loaded. Affected reports:

Advanced Search limits

Maximum file size indexed

Introduced in GitLab 13.3.

You can set a limit on the content of repository files that are indexed in Elasticsearch. Any files larger than this limit is neither indexed nor searchable.

Setting a limit helps reduce the memory usage of the indexing processes and the overall index size. This value defaults to 1024 KiB (1 MiB) as any text files larger than this likely aren’t meant to be read by humans.

You must set a limit, as unlimited file sizes aren’t supported. Setting this value to be greater than the amount of memory on GitLab Sidekiq nodes causes the GitLab Sidekiq nodes to run out of memory, as this amount of memory is pre-allocated during indexing.

Maximum field length

Introduced in GitLab 12.8.

You can set a limit on the content of text fields indexed for Advanced Search. Setting a maximum helps to reduce the load of the indexing processes. If any text field exceeds this limit, then the text is truncated to this number of characters. The rest of the text is not indexed, and not searchable. This applies to all indexed data except repository files that get indexed, which have a separate limit. For more information, read Maximum file size indexed.

  • On GitLab.com, the field length limit is 20,000 characters.
  • For self-managed installations, the field length is unlimited by default.

You can configure this limit for self-managed installations when you enable Elasticsearch. Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

Wiki limits

Snippets limits

See the documentation about Snippets settings.

Design Management limits

See the Design Management Limitations section.

Push Event Limits

Webhooks and Project Services

Introduced in GitLab 12.4.

Total number of changes (branches or tags) in a single push. If changes are more than the specified limit, hooks won’t be executed.

More information can be found in these docs:

Activities

Introduced in GitLab 12.4.

Total number of changes (branches or tags) in a single push to determine whether individual push events or a bulk push event are created.

More information can be found in the Push event activities limit and bulk push events documentation.

Package Registry Limits

File Size Limits

Introduced in GitLab 13.4.

On GitLab.com, the maximum file size for a package that’s uploaded to the GitLab Package Registry varies by format:

  • Conan: 5 GB
  • Generic: 5 GB
  • Maven: 5 GB
  • npm: 5 GB
  • NuGet: 5 GB
  • PyPI: 5 GB

To set this limit for a self-managed installation, run the following in the GitLab Rails console: 

# File size limit is stored in bytes

# For Conan Packages
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(conan_max_file_size: 100.megabytes)

# For npm Packages
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(npm_max_file_size: 100.megabytes)

# For NuGet Packages
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(nuget_max_file_size: 100.megabytes)

# For Maven Packages
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(maven_max_file_size: 100.megabytes)

# For PyPI Packages
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(pypi_max_file_size: 100.megabytes)

# For Debian Packages
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(debian_max_file_size: 100.megabytes)

# For Generic Packages
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(generic_packages_max_file_size: 100.megabytes)

Set the limit to 0 to allow any file size.

Package versions returned

When asking for versions of a given NuGet package name, the GitLab Package Registry returns a maximum of 300 versions.

Branch retargeting on merge

Introduced in GitLab 13.9.

If a branch is merged while open merge requests still point to it, GitLab can retarget merge requests pointing to the now-merged branch. To learn more, read Branch retargeting on merge.