We are new to GItlab.com Education but have been using Gitlab on prem for over a decade.
We had our first class on Monday and Students signed in via SAML (provisioned via SCIM). However the class hit a rate limit when they all tried to sign in at the start of the session. There were approx 100 students in this class.
I logged a ticket 330221 and the reply that I had was that /users/ is a protected path and is limited to 10 requests per minute per IP. As our institution uses a common NATed IP this is hit very easily.
10 requests per minute is a very low threshold for rate limiting, has anyone else experienced this in an education setting ? Is there a workaround ?
If you are using Gitlab.com, then the rate limits are as here:
you cannot exceed them and you cannot change them or have a workaround for it. You would need to attempt to ask Gitlab to increase the limits. I personally have never limited more than 100 a minute per single IP, but obviously Gitlab had a reason to set it like this to prevent abuse.
If you have your own Gitlab installation, then the documentation explains how you can increase it for your own installation:
Since user login doesn’t happen often anyway, then what you experienced wouldn’t normally be a problem. Obviously in your class scenario it wasn’t ideal because it exceeded the limits.
Personally my view is that if someone is running a class/training course, then they should be running their own server installation for it, rather than Gitlab.com. So my main question is why use Gitlab.com instead of your own installation of Gitlab?
Thanks for the reply, our institution has made a decision to move systems to SaaS environments (cloud first strategy). We were consuming a lot of storage on premise and we were not able to justify the ongoing cost.
Because the education programme on Gitlab.com is free of charge then it was agreed to move to this for this academic year.
Assuming that you have a subscription, as you opened a ticket previously and got a reply, as well as that you just mentioned that your storage requirements were quite large for a self-hosted - would mean most likely you aren’t using the Gitlab for free else your storage limit would be about 5GB per project. I would suggest that if you do have such paid support, to continue the discussion in the ticket and ask if the limits can be increased.
The forum is mainly community members so we wouldn’t be able to help with that, you would need to petition Gitlab for increasing the limits if they are too restrictive.