[gmx-developers] GitLab CI artifacts pushing 5TB

[Eric Irrgang]

Hi Devs.

According to https://gitlab.com/gromacs/gromacs/-/usage_quotas we are almost at 5TB of retained job artifacts, and growing.

Do we have any idea of how big that can get before it becomes a problem?

I notice that we have selected the option to override the `expire_in` job artifact parameter for successful pipelines and to instead retain artifacts for the most recent commit on each ref indefinitely.
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/job_artifacts.html#keep-artifacts-from-most-recent-successful-jobs

Is this necessary or appropriate? We have a _lot_ of branches, and it is unclear how/whether artifacts are trimmed for refs for branches that have been removed.

If the existing value of `expire_in` is too short, maybe we could set it to a longer, but finite time instead of "forever".

If we want to further reduce our artifacts volume, we could set `expire_in` to something less.

We could also consider generating less artifact volume by merging some jobs or stages. The config jobs, for instance, take only marginally longer to run than the overhead they generate, so we would lose very little CPU/pod time by merging them with the build jobs.

Best,
Eric