Re: how long do we need to retain gitlab CI job stdout logs?

[Daniel P . Berrangé]

On Mon, Aug 08, 2022 at 08:42:28PM +0200, Thomas Huth wrote:
> On 08/08/2022 19.47, Peter Maydell wrote:
> > Hi; I just reduced QEMU's storage usage on gitlab by 130GB (no typo!)
> > using https://gitlab.com/eskultety/gitlab_cleaner, which Dan helpfully
> > pointed me at. This script removes old pipelines, which take up a
> > lot of storage space for QEMU because they include the stdout logs
> > for all the CI jobs in the pipeline. (Gitlab doesn't expire these,
> > either by default or configurably -- you have to either manually delete
> > the pipeline in the UI or else use the API, as this script does.)
> > 
> > I somewhat conservatively only blew away pipelines from before the
> > 1st January 2022. I feel like we don't really even need 6 months worth
> > of CI job logs, though -- any views on whether we should be pruning
> > them more aggressively ?
> 
> I'd say we should at least keep the logs of the last 4 to 5 months, i.e. the
> logs for one release cycle, so we can check these logs in case we introduced
> a new bug in the current release cycle.

Have we ever actually done this in practice ?  I don't think I've ever
looked at a pipeline older than 1-2 weeks in any project I've worked
with on gitlab.

Note that we currently use 165 GB, over an 8 month period (not sure on
the split between container registry and pipeline). I'd guess 4-5 months
might knock another 30-40 GB off our usage, still leaving it huge.

Personally I would suggest 1 month is sufficent for 99% of our needs.

With regards,
Daniel
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