Gitlab interaction with git for merge requests is dead

I have my own gitlab-ce copy on my server that I’ve been using for a couple of years. Very low work load. Like 20 repos and a total of 1000 commits over the whole history of that gitlab installation. I use it for my private projects and I add people in my vicinity for discussing code. Everything is as basic as it’s. I never moved it or did anything special. The only special thing in it is that I use apache reverse proxy as a proxy to forward the http interface with tls.

A few weeks ago, gitlab started acting completely crazy and I’d really appreciate helping me troubleshoot this issue. As far as I know, this didn’t come with a specific upgrade or change. My assessment of the issue is that it seems that the asynchronous communication between gitlab and git is completely dead.

Symptoms:

  1. Merge requests never see new commits unless I close and reopen them
  2. Merging a merge request never works… it just keeps spinning forever
  3. (not sure about this, as I really don’t remember whether they worked before): Emails don’t work anymore, even when emailing myself locally on the same machine

Even though I’m a developer (C/C++/Rust/Python and a few others), my knowledge in ruby/rails is close to zero. I tried to troubleshoot sidekiq because it seems to be the first culprit, but I found nothing there. Can someone please help me troubleshoot this issue?

Thank you. I understand I’m asking for a lot of someone. But I have no other means to fix this. If you need any logs, please tell me where to send them and I will.