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At my company we're currently using a self-deployed copy of the http://gitorious.org code to manage our repositories..

It's an absolute monster!!

Gitorious is a very heavy ruby on rails app and the server crashes about every 2 weeks..

It's running Ubuntu Server 10.04

And it has 1GB of RAM!!

Were a team of about 5 developers with currently about 10 repositories including stuff like vim configs etc..

I'm thinking about switching us back to gitosis running on an old CLI / Server edition of ubuntu..

Ideally i'd like to have it running as light as possible on a box with 256mb of ram..

Which ubuntu is new enough to support all the gitosis dependancies and but old enough to cope under 256mb of ram?

Thanks very much

Daniel

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I would definitely advice gitolite. We use gitosis in house, manage a bunch of repositories that are about 20G in size compressed and have a lot of developers accessing them 24/7. The server usage is very light, never had an issue. Gitolite only improves upon gitosis and provides much finer grain of access control. I think we would be moving in that direction pretty soon.

We moved to gitolite and couldn't have been happier. Provides much better error checking and has much better grouping. Another thing we've learned that RW provides much of the necessary access but RW+ allows remote branch deletion privileges.

Next stop gitlab. But the latest version of gitlab stopped using gitolite for credentials management so we are skeptical about over-hauling our access management. Again.

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  • +1 and if you need some sort of GUI look and feel, try cgit.
    – sybreon
    Mar 13, 2012 at 2:29
  • Also, separating your authentication system and UI means that you can easily try different UIs without having to configure access over and over again.
    – devicenull
    Jan 15, 2013 at 3:00
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Do you actually need the GUI functions of Gitorious? If you don't, you can use something like Gitolite to manage git access control. You can't really get any less resource intensive then Gitolite.

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So ... your memory may not be used the way you assume. Ubuntu (and all modern Linux kernels) keep memory in a cache state. Cache is not a bad thing. The kernel reserves this memory just in case it needs the space, but it is very quick to release it when another application requests the space.

You can verify if this space is used by the cache, with the commands vmstat and free.

Here's a short answer on ServerFault describing the cache "issue".

Now ... why is Gitorius crashing? You should look through your logs and find a root cause. Note the time your server crashes, and then begin to look through your apache and gitorius logs.

Try turning up the default apache LogLevel to info or debug.

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    linuxatemyram.com
    – Kyle Brantley
    Mar 31, 2011 at 17:41
  • Thanks.. @Joseph only problem is that server only really gets used at the end of the day when we're pushing our work up.. so it could be crashing at any point without us noticing.. but will look anyway :) we've actually had similar problems with our ruby on rails web server.. maybe starting to see a trend here.. I should mention now that we're running on Microsoft Hyper-V with the proper integration components installed.. Our hypervisor box is getting push to the max at the moment so i'd like to switch to gitosis (or something else light) anyway! :P
    – Daniel Upton
    Apr 1, 2011 at 8:31
  • I repointed your link because one has to registered to read it... and on that note, shame on Ubuntu forums for that requirement.
    – Jeff Ferland
    Mar 13, 2012 at 1:13
  • Thanks @JeffFerland I think that's a new mechanism on the forums.
    – Joseph Kern
    Mar 13, 2012 at 21:41

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