I have GitLab CE and it has been running perfectly for many years. I always patch and update my servers and never had a problem. But a month ago, I updated GitLab, and at the same time I updated the server from Ubuntu 22 to Ubuntu 24. I immediately started having problems.
When I access the site now, I get partial timeouts on certain features. My Zabbix server detects random “liveness” failures throughout the day, even when no one is even using it.
I can open GitLab and hit the projects page and I get this:
An error occurred loading the projects. Please refresh the page to try again.
If I click on Issues, I get
An error occurred while getting issue counts
If I refresh the page multiple times it will start working. I have updated the GitLab instance several times since this started and rebooted the server, it made no difference.
I am currently on v17.11.1.
The server is running on ESXi, and the VM has 8 CPU’s and 8 Gigs of RAM. That has not changed in many years. The VM Dashboard shows nothing unusual.
Any suggestions on where to start troubleshooting?
It might be related to the upgrade to Ubuntu 24; some dependencies or services GitLab relies on could be acting up. I’d start by checking the GitLab logs (gitlab-ctl tail) to see what’s failing when those timeouts happen. Also worth looking at PostgreSQL and Redis status, and maybe running gitlab-rake gitlab: check to see if anything obvious shows up.
Could also try increasing RAM if usage is spiking; 8GB can be a bit tight for GitLab these days.
Also, since it’s Ubuntu, you may wish to consider uninstalling snap/snapd packages as I find those to be resource hogs. If you are just installing packages via apt, then you won’t need them. I doubt anyone uses snap/snapd on servers anyway. At least makes no sense to me.
same issue here with Ubuntu 22.04 and gitlab 11. It occurs when gitlab is swapped because of workload of the server (especially after a backup of postgresql databases). With gitlab < 11, all was OK and now, many error messages and the only solution found is to execute command “swapoff -a && swapon -a”. Can I set up the timeout value ?
?? The current version of GitLab is 18.5. 11 is 6-7 years old, and absolutely not supported anymore. I wouldn’t be surprised that you run into all sorts of weird problems if you’re running something that old, but as it’ll probably be a nightmare to make that run on Ubuntu 22.04, I guess you just left out a part of the version number, but that makes it hard to guess what you’re actually running, and no version with a version number like 11 is supported at the moment.