So I’ve been using GitHub for a while for some cross platform hobby projects and I want to start figuring out how to set up CI/CD.
Since I prefer not to pay for hosting and minutes and all that stuff I have decided to use GitLab self hosting. My understanding is that it has good CI/CD capabilities built in.
I’ve set up GitLab CE on my Synology NAS DS1513+. This is a 2GB device from 2013 so I wasn’t surprised to find it painfully slow to navigate around the GitLab web site even with just one single user. I can see that 8GB is recommended.
So I’m considering my options. My preference would be to continue with a Synology docker based-approach as I already use and need a NAS but I wanted to ask what my expectations should be if I were to upgrade to let’s say the DS1019+ which out of the box is a quad core celeron 8GB machine.
With a single user can I expect fast browsing of the site and efficient push and pulling? I don’t need to support multiple users and I would anticipate setting up CI/CD runners on separate machines on my LAN with the NAS GitLab just serving as the GitLab server.
Is this a realistic aspiration? Or should I be going the whole hog and setting up a dedicated Ubuntu machine or possibly running a VMware Ubuntu VM inside my fast Windows desktop? Both of these are options but it’d be great to be able to achieve what I want using the NAS as it would simplify a few things, such as I can just hook into the existing Synology backup process which I use to send stuff offsite and it would take up less space. Plus it’s one less point of failure.
I would love to hear feedback from people who have setup GitLab on their Synology NAS and what sort of performance they get as I can’t seem to find much information out there other than what is written in the recommendations here. Clearly my current NAS doesn’t have enough RAM but is that the only issue? There is reference in the docs here to using “recent cpu” but that could mean anything as recent Cpus can have various different specs, eg what does this mean in relation to the quad-core celerons used in recent Synology DS devices for example?