Moving from running CE in one container, to multiple containers on a swarm for performance upgrade

Hi there

We’ve been running our gitlab-ce install out of one docker container with docker-compose, like so

https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/docker/#install-gitlab-using-docker-compose

That’s been working fine, albeit a little slow, but easily bearable.

We’ve recently moved to using a swarm, with a gluster backend. We’re still in the process of fine tuning gluster, and as it’s a bit slower than normal IO access, we’d like to speed up our gitlab as much as possible.

I’ve been looking at this option, of running it with 4 replicated runners

https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/docker/#deploy-gitlab-in-a-docker-swarm

Also looking at this option, of splitting out the postgresql and redis containers. Although, I am having trouble seamlessly moving the data over in this option

Has anyone got any experience of moving from a single container install to a multi container install?

One question I’ve got about the multiple containers running the gitlab-runners, will that only speed up the CI/CD elements? We aren’t using the CI/CD elements, so just wondering if adding containers to run multiple gitlab-runners will help us at all?

Any help, or tips, greatly appreciated.

Sorry for reviving, but I am facing a similar situation: moving from a bare-metal Omnibus installation directly into Docker Swarm (the runners are already in the swarm and running nicely).

I don’t know if it’s a good idea, or even possible without too much hacking but it seems that there are very little information about GitLab running in Docker Swarm, so I am desperately asking here just a tiny question: @mjdavies have you managed to run GitLab smoothly in the swarm, if so, do you have any recommendation on resources?