Gitlab & Gitlab Runner Installation in a 16GB server for Production

GitLab CI/CD
, ,
1

My Company Wants a Server for all things Gitlab, including Gitlab Runner

It’s a 16GB VPS, 4 CPU, I installed Gitlab-CE on it already, via the omnibus package, with a few tweaks to consume less memory, right now the server is facing 34% memory consumption, while being idle

Now, I want to install Gitlab Runner, I know it’s not recommended to install both on the same machine, but what if:

  1. our pipelines aren’t triggered that often and neither are that heavy
  2. our team is very small ( hardly ever more than 4 devs are working at the same time )
  3. I can make a few tweaks to Gitlab runner also, to improve performance
  4. I’ll make an effort not to use privileged=true for the runners, but it might be necessary

with all that in place, is it still a really bad idea to have Gitlab and Gitlab Runner installed on the same machine on a production environment?

of course we plan to migrate Gitlab Runner to another server as our team and project number grows, but is this setup solid for a few months?

Thanks for taking your time to answer, it really helps! :blush:

2

Yes it’s a bad idea, because it’s an unsupported configuration and it doesn’t matter if your runner will not be triggered often. It’s simply not recommended and not supported. When you experience problems, people here will tell you to remove the Gitlab Runner and install it on a separate machine. If you want to do it you can, but pretty much nobody will help you when it doesn’t work or when you experience problems. For a development environment, sure it would be OK. For production, really bad idea.

There is no reason to install it on the same machine. You would be better off, having one server with 4vcpu and 8GB of ram for Gitlab, and then a second server with say 2vcu and 4GB ram for the runner. And if needed, the servers can then be upgraded to 16GB or whatever when you find you are requiring more resources for Gitlab because you have a lot of projects, users or whatever, or increase the resources on the runner when you find you need more for your pipelines.

1 Like