Gitaly: Assess effectiveness of adaptive limiter

John Cai
2026-04-02T19:03:37Z

Adaptive limiting is a mechanism in Gitaly that monitors system resources and pushes back on incoming traffic accordingly. Given the string of incidents in the past few weeks, let's analyze how effective the adaptive limiter was in pushing back on traffic and allowing Gitaly to recover.

1. https://app.incident.io/gitlab/incidents/8946
2. https://app.incident.io/gitlab/incidents/8712
3. https://app.incident.io/gitlab/incidents/8175
4. https://app.incident.io/gitlab/incidents/7418
5. https://app.incident.io/gitlab/incidents/7515

Questions to answer

1. What evidence do we have that adaptive limiting kicked in, and behaved in an expected way?
2. What evidence do we have that adaptive limiting was responsible for protecting the system?
3. What improvements do we need to make to the adaptive limiter?