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

[Markus Armbruster]

Daniel P. Berrangé <berrange@redhat.com> writes:

> 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.

100GiB is a lot even in 2022.

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

Makes sense to me.

If we really need more, maybe look into storing suitable deltas?