Help importing a large (HUUUUUGE) Gitlab export

Hi everyone! I am new-ish to gitlab administration but learning quickly. The environment i manage has a few gitlab instances and the task I have been assigned is to migrate them all in to our main instance. Once that is complete, I will be upgrading gitlab and the OS on the main instance. So far I have hit challences with the large repos we have but I have managed to make it all work.

So far i have moved every repo/project, some pretty big, 40GB! I have had to expand disks on both machines to accommodate the export and the import. I have also increased RAM, CPU cores, worker processes, and timeouts! It allowed me to overcome the hurdles so far but now i am stuck on my last repo/project and would LOOOOVE some help/advice! It keeps failing with a 502 error after a few hours. " Whoops, GitLab is taking too much time to respond."

Main gitlab: 12.5.4 (Import to)
Secondary instance: 11.10.8 (Export)
11.7 to 12.10 are compatible
Last project/repo is 408GB in gitlab and 181GB exported!!

unicorn[‘worker_processes’] = ‘10’
unicorn[‘worker_timeout’] = ‘1800’

Any thoughts or ideas?

Hi @yeahthatperson
what method do you use to import the repository? Do you use the rake imports?

I have been trying to use the export/import function in the web UI. I have not tried the rake imports. When I have read that, it mentions “bare repositories” and I think I was/am confused as to what a bare repository is, LOL. What is a “bare repository”?