Reference architecture: up to 1,000 users

This page describes GitLab reference architecture for up to 1,000 users. For a full list of reference architectures, see Available reference architectures.

If you need to serve up to 1,000 users and you don’t have strict availability requirements, a single-node solution with frequent backups is appropriate for many organizations .

  • Supported users (approximate): 1,000
  • High Availability: No. For a highly-available environment, you can follow a modified 3K reference architecture.
  • Test requests per second (RPS) rates: API: 20 RPS, Web: 2 RPS, Git (Pull): 2 RPS, Git (Push): 1 RPS
Users Configuration GCP AWS Azure
Up to 500 4 vCPU, 3.6 GB memory n1-highcpu-4 c5.xlarge F4s v2
Up to 1,000 8 vCPU, 7.2 GB memory n1-highcpu-8 c5.2xlarge F8s v2

The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) architectures were built and tested using the Intel Xeon E5 v3 (Haswell) CPU platform. On different hardware you may find that adjustments, either lower or higher, are required for your CPU or node counts. For more information, see our Sysbench-based CPU benchmarks.

In addition to the stated configurations, we recommend having at least 2 GB of swap on your server, even if you currently have enough available memory. Having swap helps to reduce the chance of errors occurring if your available memory changes. We also recommend configuring the kernel’s swappiness setting to a lower value (such as 10) to make the most of your memory, while still having the swap available when needed.

Setup instructions

To install GitLab for this default reference architecture, use the standard installation instructions.

You can also optionally configure GitLab to use an external PostgreSQL service or an external object storage service for added performance and reliability at an increased complexity cost.

You can leverage Elasticsearch and enable Advanced Search for faster, more advanced code search across your entire GitLab instance.

Elasticsearch cluster design and requirements are dependent on your specific data. For recommended best practices about how to set up your Elasticsearch cluster alongside your instance, read how to choose the optimal cluster configuration.