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IR-0006: Repository & Distribution Pipeline Queue Lag - Ziraat Teknoloji

  • Status: Resolved
  • Date: 2025-09-03
  • Severity: SEV-2 - High
  • Duration: ~3 days (intermittent, 2025-09-03 to 2025-09-08)
  • Affected: Ziraat Teknoloji (Self-Hosted 3.29.0) - repository connection, build distribution, notifications
  • Owners: @recep

Summary

Repository operations and the distribution pipeline experienced intermittent blocking: processes queued for 1-2 hours and then executed all at once. Build artifacts were delayed before reaching Testing Distribution profiles, repository refresh operations hung, and test notification emails were delayed, all during a critical customer release cycle.


Timeline

All times UTC+3 (Istanbul).

Time Date Event
15:45 Sep 2, 2025 Zeynep (customer) reports disconnect/reconnect error; branches not refreshing after 10 min wait.
15:48 Sep 2, 2025 Repository can be selected but will not fetch; PAT authentication error observed.
16:08 Sep 2, 2025 A ~1h20m blockage observed; queued distribution emails arrive simultaneously.
17:47 Sep 2, 2025 Second occurrence: test package emails not delivered.
09:34 Sep 3, 2025 Customer opens Ticket #755 with logs and screenshots.
16:56 Sep 3, 2025 Third occurrence reported; investigation meeting held.
09:17 Sep 4, 2025 Recep identifies a specific Testing Distribution profile involved; missing GitLab webhook events for the Android project confirmed.
21:01 Sep 5, 2025 Priority escalated to URGENT; internal deep-dive meeting held.
12:30 Sep 6, 2025 Hotfix package generated, verified in customer test env, deployed to production.
17:30 Sep 8, 2025 Customer confirms the issue no longer occurs under real-world usage.

Root Cause

On repository connection, the system queried commits across all branches. For a repository with 1600+ branches this took far longer than expected, and additional per-branch existence-check queries during connection tests compounded the delay. As a result, other events could not be processed on time, degrading overall pipeline throughput. This was a customer-specific scenario (very high branch count) not seen in standard repository structures.


Impact

  • Customers affected: Ziraat Teknoloji (self-hosted)
  • Services degraded: Repository connection/refresh, build distribution to Testing Distribution, notification emails
  • Data loss: No

Resolution

  • Commit retrieval limited to the default branch; commits from other branches are queried only when explicitly selected in the UI.
  • For GitLab, increased the page size for commit and branch queries, reducing request volume.
  • Removed the real-time branch existence check during selection; validation now happens only once for the branch used to start a build.
  • Delivered via a build server patch release deployed to the customer, verified across refresh + Publish + Distribution scenarios.

Action Items

# Action Owner Due Date Status
1 Apply the changes to the new self-hosted image Infra Team 2025-09-18 Done
2 Add automated alerting for pipeline performance-degradation patterns Backend / DevOps Pending

  • Linear issue(s): BE-7022, BE-7009
  • Support ticket: Zendesk #755
  • Related PR(s): build server patch release (3.29.x)