@@ -5,13 +5,44 @@ For more information about setting up GitLab Geo, read the
When you're done, you can navigate to **Admin area ➔ Geo nodes** (`/admin/geo_nodes`).
In the following table you can see what all these settings mean:
## Common settings
| Setting | Description |
| --------- | ----------- |
| Primary | This marks a Geo Node as primary. There can be only one primary, make sure that you first add the primary node and then all the others. |
| URL | Your instance's full URL, in the same way it is configured in `/etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb` (Omnibus GitLab installations) or `gitlab.yml` (source based installations). |
| Public Key | The SSH public key of the user that your GitLab instance runs on (unless changed, should be the user `git`). |
All Geo nodes have the following settings:
A primary node will have a star right next to it to distinguish from the
secondaries.
| Setting | Description |
| --------| ----------- |
| Primary | This marks a Geo Node as primary. There can be only one primary, make sure that you first add the primary node and then all the others. |
| URL | The instance's full URL, in the same way it is configured in `/etc/gitlab/gitlab.rb` (Omnibus GitLab installations) or `gitlab.yml` (source based installations). |
The node you're reading from is indicated with a green `Current node` label, and
the primary is given a blue `Primary` label. Remember that you can only make
changes on the primary!
## Secondary node settings
Secondaries have a number of additional settings available:
| Setting | Description|
|--------------------------|------------|
| Public Key | The SSH public key of the user that your GitLab instance runs on (unless changed, should be the user `git`). |
| Groups to replicate | Enable Geo selective sync for this secondary - only the selected groups will be synchronized. |
| Repository sync capacity | Number of concurrent requests this secondary will make to the primary when backfilling repositories. |
| File sync capacity | Number of concurrent requests this secondary will make to the primary when backfilling files. |
## Geo backfill
Secondaries are notified of changes to repositories and files by the primary,
and will always attempt to synchronize those changes as quickly as possible.
Backfill is the act of populating the secondary with repositories and files that
existed *before* the secondary was added to the database. Since there may be
extremely large numbers of repositories and files, it's infeasible to attempt to
download them all at once, so GitLab places an upper limit on the concurrency of
these operations.
How long the backfill takes is a function of the maximum concurrency, but higher
values place more strain on the primary node. From [GitLab 10.2](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/merge_requests/3107),
the limits are configurable - if your primary node has lots of surplus capacity,
you can increase the values to complete backfill in a shorter time. If it's
under heavy load and backfill is reducing its availability for normal requests,