Comment by ksec

6 hours ago

>Speed. The GitLab web interface has always felt sluggish to me.

10 years later the same problem remains. While Gitea / Forgejo have very little performance problems. And will only get better once Go 1.26 is out. Which is a much bigger release than a single digit version number upgrade.

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ksec

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WA  4 hours ago

I used GitLab only as a remote repo for private projects, no CI at all. The laggy interface and that damn browser check every so often made me close my account.

WD-42  4 hours ago

It must be a fundamental architectural problem with Gitlab. When I had to use it for work the speed killed me. Especially searching for issues. I will never consider gitlab for anything until they find a way to boost performance.

  • jeremyjh  3 hours ago

    The Ruby on Rails tax. It isn’t impossible to make snappy apps with it, but it must be uneconomical in terms of dev costs because no one does.

    • 12_throw_away  1 hour ago

      > The Ruby on Rails tax.

      Yeah, from my experience administering a pretty small self-hosted instance, I think it's got to be this. Every single admin action you try to take on the backend is SLOWWWWW. Restarting the services takes a few minutes. Just to bring up an admin console on the server in a CLI takes well over a minute, which indicates a tremendous amount of overhead purely on the ruby side.

      There's just something fundamentally slow about how it's all put together. I wouldn't blame the language or tech stack, exactly - but perhaps Ruby on Rails is not a great fit, anymore, for a fully featured forge of this scale?

    • ksec  2 hours ago

      I dont think that is true, consider Fuzzy, Hey, Basecamp, Shopify all seems to be doing fine. Shopify actually got impressively fast in the recent two years I have no idea why. Github used to be fast as well.

      So while Go by default will always be faster then Ruby Rails, there are plenty of examples of decently fast Ruby Rails Apps. Having 10 years saying they will improve performance and not getting any of it suggest problems with Gitlab itself more than RoR.

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dewey  6 hours ago

Just like a truck will always be more sluggish than a small car. They are very different beasts where one is aimed at enterprises and the other one for small projects without all the corporate needs.

  • oivey  12 minutes ago

    A truck is sluggish because of its weight and inertia. It’s a law of nature. What law of nature is making Gitlab slow?

  • pornel  3 hours ago

    The enterprise version is just as slow.

    I thought they're only struggling with the free public version, but no. GitLab run on a private box is the same bag of lags and loading spinners.

    • dewey  3 hours ago

      I'm not talking about GitLab enterprise vs. GitLab free. It's about GitLab vs small projects like Gitea / Forgejo mentioned in the parent comment.

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