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.

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 user-submitted comments will fail.

  • 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 will result in an error, and the item will not be created.

It’s possible that this limit will be changed to a lower number in the future.

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

Number of issues in the milestone overview

Introduced in GitLab 12.10.

The maximum number of issues loaded on the milestone overview page is 3000. 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: 3000 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

Introduced in GitLab 8.12.

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 per project, and per group, is limited.

To set this limit on 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!

# For project webhooks
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(project_hooks: 100)

# For group webhooks
Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(group_hooks: 100)
Note: Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

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 via 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 via 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 on 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
Note: 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 will fail with a job_activity_limit_exceeded error.

  • On GitLab.com different limits are defined per plan and they affect all projects under that plan.
  • On GitLab Starter tier or higher self-managed installations, this limit is defined for the default plan that affects all projects. This limit is disabled by default.

To set this limit on 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)
Note: 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 will be considered invalid.

  • On GitLab.com different limits are defined per plan and they affect all projects under that plan.
  • On GitLab Starter tier or higher self-managed installations, this limit is defined for the default plan that affects all projects.

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

Plan.default.actual_limits.update!(ci_project_subscriptions: 500)
Note: 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 will not be created.

On GitLab.com, different limits are defined per plan, and they affect all projects under that plan.

On self-managed instances (GitLab Starter or higher tiers), this limit is defined for the default plan that affects all projects. By default, there is no limit.

To set this limit on 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 will not be 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)

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 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 Request reports

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

Advanced Global Search limits

Maximum field length

Introduced in GitLab 12.8.

You can set a limit on the content of text fields indexed for Global Search. Setting a maximum helps to reduce the load of the indexing processes. If any text field exceeds this limit then the text will be truncated to this number of characters and the rest will not be indexed and hence will not be searchable.

  • On GitLab.com this is limited to 20000 characters
  • For self-managed installations it is unlimited by default

This limit can be configured for self-managed installations when enabling Elasticsearch.

Note: Set the limit to 0 to disable it.

Wiki limits

Snippets limits

See the documentation on 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 bulk push event will be created.

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