We have a (private) repository on GitLab that is our template for starting new projects. Today, one of our developers attempted to push a commit, and got a message about exceeding the repository size limit. Checking on the GitLab web UI, it did indeed say that the repository was using 13.7 GB on both "files" and "storage" (the limit being 10 GB). After attempting a repository "housekeeping" run, this increased to 15.1 GB (I have no idea if this was as a result of the "housekeeping" or if the timing is coincidental, but that's beside the point). This number seems to be very wrong to me: The .git folder in the checked out project is approx. 540 MB 3 projects that were forked from this template project within the last month or so (and have had some large binary files added since) are reporting between 1 and 2 GB each Running git-sizer on the checked out project says the total size of all blobs is 986 MiB, with the total size of the biggest checkout being 758 MiB Exporting the entire repository from GitLab results in a 1.82 GB tar.gz file The only significant work that's gone on since the aforementioned forks did require adding a few moderately large (tens of MB) files, but even after deleting that branch and running "housekeeping" again, the reported size of the repository has not dropped. The repository has no wiki, no CI/CD, no package, and only a hand full of merge requests and issues. Is there anything that I'm missing that could be causing ~14 GB of data to be reported? Or is there any way to force GitLab to recalculate the size of the repo?

A git repository size on remote includes loose objects, whereas if you're working locally (or off of a fork), you likely don't have those loose objects, or they were cleaned up. Most of the time, you only have a copy of the default branch and whatever branches you've worked on locally, not every branch that has been pushed to the remote. You can follow the GitLab documentation on reducing repository size . The comment from a Backend Engineer on this repository cleanup issue may also help explain what's happening a little further. The key thing from this comment is that you need to wait 30 minutes after following the documented instructions for the Housekeeping/cleanup job to work properly.

gitlab.com reporting incorrect repository size

We have a (private) repository on GitLab that is our template for starting new projects. Today, one of our developers attempted to push a commit, and got a message about exceeding the repository size limit. Checking on the GitLab web UI, it did indeed say that the repository was using 13.7 GB on both "files" and "storage" (the limit being 10 GB). After attempting a repository "housekeeping" run, this increased to 15.1 GB (I have no idea if this was as a result of the "housekeeping" or if the timing is coincidental, but that's beside the point).

This number seems to be very wrong to me:

The .git folder in the checked out project is approx. 540 MB
3 projects that were forked from this template project within the last month or so (and have had some large binary files added since) are reporting between 1 and 2 GB each
Running git-sizer on the checked out project says the total size of all blobs is 986 MiB, with the total size of the biggest checkout being 758 MiB
Exporting the entire repository from GitLab results in a 1.82 GB tar.gz file

The only significant work that's gone on since the aforementioned forks did require adding a few moderately large (tens of MB) files, but even after deleting that branch and running "housekeeping" again, the reported size of the repository has not dropped.

The repository has no wiki, no CI/CD, no package, and only a hand full of merge requests and issues.

Is there anything that I'm missing that could be causing ~14 GB of data to be reported? Or is there any way to force GitLab to recalculate the size of the repo?

gitlab.com reporting incorrect repository size

1 Answers