---
features:
  secondary:
  - name: Improved performance for the GitLab Container Registry garbage collection
      algorithm for Google Cloud Storage (GCS)
    available_in:
    - core
    - starter
    - premium
    - ultimate
    gitlab_com: true
    documentation_link: 'https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/packages/container_registry.html#container-registry-garbage-collection'
    reporter: trizzi
    stage: package
    categories:
    - Container Registry
    issue_url: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/2552
    description: |
      Our users have expressed frustration about the long downtime that is needed to run garbage collection on old, unused images, and we've heard you. The improvements we've made to the efficiency of the cleanup code means you don't have to make a tradeoff between two bad options: taking a long outage, or keeping around lots of unneeded files.

      In GitLab 12.9, we are excited to announce a significant improvement in the performance of garbage collection for instances using the GitLab Container Registry and leveraging GCS for storage. While testing with a 1.4GiB repository, which is a rough approximation of the 10 TiB registry used on dev.gitlab.org, we [observed a performance improvement of 95%](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/201956#note_304641053).
