ArgoCD — Benchmarks
Scope
Performance characteristics, scaling limits, and resource consumption profiles.
| Scenario |
Apps |
Clusters |
Avg Sync Time |
P95 Sync Time |
Notes |
| Small deployment |
50 |
3 |
2-5s |
8s |
Single controller |
| Medium deployment |
200 |
10 |
5-15s |
30s |
Controller sharded x2 |
| Large deployment |
1000 |
50 |
10-30s |
60s |
Controller sharded x4 |
| Monorepo (10k files) |
100 |
5 |
30-60s |
120s |
Sparse checkout recommended |
Resource Consumption
Controller Memory Scaling
The application controller's memory grows linearly with the number of managed resources:
| Managed Resources |
Controller Memory |
Controller CPU |
| 1,000 |
~256Mi |
~200m |
| 5,000 |
~1Gi |
~500m |
| 20,000 |
~4Gi |
~2000m |
| 50,000 |
~8Gi |
~4000m |
| Operation |
Small Chart |
Large Chart (500+ templates) |
Monorepo |
| Helm template |
< 1s |
5-15s |
N/A |
| Kustomize build |
< 1s |
2-5s |
10-30s |
| Git clone (cold) |
1-3s |
1-3s |
30-120s |
| Git fetch (warm) |
< 1s |
< 1s |
2-5s |
Scaling Limits
| Dimension |
Tested Limit |
Recommended Limit |
Bottleneck |
| Applications per controller |
~5,000 |
2,000 |
Memory + reconciliation |
| Clusters per instance |
~200 |
100 |
API server connections |
| Concurrent syncs |
50 (default) |
20-30 |
Repo server CPU |
| Webhook events/sec |
~100 |
50 |
Redis throughput |
| ApplicationSets |
~500 |
200 |
Generator evaluation time |
- Intuit manages 3,000+ applications across multiple clusters using controller sharding
- Argo Project's official scalability testing targets 1,000 apps / 100 clusters per instance
- Red Hat OpenShift GitOps (ArgoCD-based) recommends max 300 apps per non-sharded instance