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Comment by misnome | Hacker News Reader

GitLab is just as bad, just not as big so doesn't get the coverage. https://status.gitlab.com/pages/history/5b36dc6502d06804c083...

And of course many people self-host which changes a lot of the equation (which you can also do with GitHub, but not for free - and FWIW our self-hosted premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime, which we've been told by the team responsible is an unavoidable side-effect of backing up gitlab).

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I was responsible for administering a self hosted GitLab instance for a medium sized company and our backups never required downtime. The built in backup command doesn't require downtime but also isn't a consistent point in time snapshot (specifically because the instance keeps running while the backup is being taken). If they've decided they need one for some reason, stopping GitLab is certainly the easiest way, but not the only way of accomplishing that goal, but that'll be true of any self-hosted forge, including GitHub.

You could stop it, do a snapshot of the storage and backup that for <1 min of downtime probably.

But at the same time, if you're not a global company, doing it at 3am is probably fine.

It can be an issue if you are using gitlab as your container/package registry and production workloads need to pull from it, though.

They should be pulling from a pull through scanning repository cache anyway, so they can be scanned before going into production.

Doing a snapshot of the storage while it's running wouldn't be bad either, it'd just be like having cut power at the point of the snapshot, right?

Yes. And the database used by GitLab is Postgres which handles that just fine.

Weird. I’ve been on a self hosted enterprise gitlab and I think we’ve have only one or two performance degradations/outages in the past 6 years

We’re talking about the SaaS version, not self-hosted.

Are you sure?

> [...] and FWIW our *self-hosted* premium gitlab has about an hour a day downtime

AND

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