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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> With plenty of competitors, including Atlassian, GitLab, and even Google, one thing is certain: If GitHub does stumble, there are plenty of companies that want to pick up its slack.

Atlassian? Oh god. Their software might be ideal for corporate beancounters and expensive consultants, but for everyone else it's a nightmare.

GitLab? A pile of memory leaks and other weirdness.

Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code.

edit: and another thing, Github enjoys a massive, massive network effect, next to impossible to recreate by anyone else. Except Sourceforge, but they burned so many bridges that no one sane in his mind will ever trust them again.

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Atlassian bitbucket is fine for me, and it gives free private repos. If you just want something for side projects without all of the bells and whistles, bitbucket is fine

The frequent bitbucket downtime is what got me to switch my company's stuff to github.

For us, Github has been down more than Bitbucket due to all the recent DDoS attacks.

My company has been using bitbucket for a couple of years and I personally haven't noticed much in the way of unscheduled downtime. Maybe once or twice during that time.

Shame they lack any way to discover active forks that is as useful as the GitHub network graph widget.

Using the API you can get it, they just don't bother showing it to the user.

Dev attached to the Bitbucket team here. While we love and support open source where we can, the vast majority of repositories on Bitbucket are private or public but maintained by a single organization. Our core focus is professional teams, which typically means branching (rather than forking) workflows. This has lead us to prioritize features like branch level permissions over network graphs and other features focused on forking workflows, because they are of higher value to our users. We're not ideologically opposed to them (indeed, forks are useful for some professional workflows too - such as working with contractors or external contributors), but they just haven't bubbled up to the top of our roadmap just yet.

"Google? Not so much, I highly doubt they'll ever re-open Google Code. "

One thing to remember is that the main reason Google did code.google.com was to create competition for sourceforge (I was the third or fourth person to join the code.google.com team)

Now, it's pretty much 100% that Google won't do this again anytime soon, but that doesn't mean some other large company won't have the same thought.

Maybe Google Ventures will end up investing in Gitlab, or some similar startup down the line. It seems like it would be a decent hedge, and possibly cheaper than developing and/or running it themselves.

I love both BitBucket and GitLab, have no issues with either.

I'm administrating a small-ish Gitlab server and we have to reboot it every week or else it will fail in random and weird ways due to OOM - the machine has 8GB of RAM and 20 active users, so WTF? Isn't the entire point of git to have one pretty dumb server acting as a file server and letting the client do the work?!

I believe that that is more of a Ruby runtime issue than a Gitlab issue.

Well why implement it in Ruby then if it's known that the environment is sensitive to OOM?

A memory leak would be an application issue, not a language issue.

GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket etc are not simply a GitServer, if that is all you want then there are better projects out there for that. hell basic ssh or http server can be used a gitserver with no front end at all or gitweb http://git-scm.com/docs/gitweb.html

GitLab, GitHub, BitBucket etc are project Management platforms that enable Bug Tracking, Documentation, Social networking all on top of and around basic git functions

No matter what extra functions, 20 users and 8 GB RAM is way out of proportions.

Especially these days where everything is done on the client and the server only has to run a simple API!

just use git directly then without a gui server? or hell if you need a gui use upsource, that needs 8 gb ram however it is down you still could use everything else. https://www.jetbrains.com/upsource/ (just repository browsing and code review not hosting, for hosting you need to create your bare repos yourself which is not hard)

For 20 users you should not need more than 2GB of RAM, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst...

Please ensure you've installed the Omnibus package that helps manage memory.

check out gogs https://gogs.io/

Try using JRuby instead of the MRI.

GitLab doesn't run on JRuby as far as I'm aware of.

You might want to check out Gogs. https://gogs.io/

It doesn't have Gitlab's extra features, but it makes a great, lightweight dumb server.

We run a Gitlab server at our company, with about 25 people using it to host their repos. I don't know the technical specs of the server, but it's only been down two times for the last year, so OOM seems unlikely. If it was that horrid, I'm pretty sure the admin would have said something by now.

You probably have pretty good sysadmins. My experience with Gitlab is pretty similar but you kind of have to have a bit of knowledge of systems, network and the software itself to set it up properly with the right amount of memory, CPU, etc. to accommodate for the user base.

Gitlab is one project that absolutely needs to be rebuilt using Java. Both from a performance and a deployment perspective (deploying a jar is a one line step through jetty).

Something like Akka is probably well suited for Gitlab and it's git hooks.

You might want to look into using https://github.com/kzk/unicorn-worker-killer which _should_ be enabled by default (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/bce482a59a235ed...). Besides that we're working on fixing performance problems, cutting down memory usage, etc.

That sounds really strange. What version are you running?

This is definitely not normal. For 20 users, 8GB is more than enough and it should not require constant restarts. Please check out https://about.gitlab.com/getting-help. Message me on Freenode #GitLab @ dblessing or Twitter @drewblessing or @GitLabSupport. I'm happy to help.

Are you using the GitLab Omnibus package? It has active memory management that should prevent OOM problems like this.

Actually Gitlab could be a replacement, I use it with 10 dev team + customers and we have absolutely no problem.

We tried to switch. After few days devs make a note on the table "X days without GitLab being down". X always was < 2.

Do you use gitlab.com or you own instance ?

We use our own instance since 2 years (60+ users, 200+ repo) and the only down time is for update

I am sure that own instances will run much better, but i prefer cloud services for storing such important data.

been using gitlab for the past two years at work and the only time it's inaccessible is when upgrading it. it does have a lot of other issues like response time and a difficult to navigate ui but crashing is not one of them.

What version are you on? Since GitLab 8.0 great improvements have been made to the UI and if there is something still wrong on the latest version we would love to know.

it is generally hard to navigate, every time i'm adding a user and giving him access to groups/projects i have to spend a minute to figure out where. the new CI gui is worse than the old one (pre-8).

We're sorry for the downtime on GitLab.com in 2015. It has gotten better this year but we're still working on improving the response time. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 for more information.

I dunno if it's impossible to recreate. You could just scrape GitHub's user data, mirror all public repositories, provide GitHub login, and do everything you can to ensure that your new competing thing lets people move away from GitHub with no friction.

I believe Github provides a free data-dump of their publically-available data. That makes things even easier, it's just no one's done it yet.

They aren't talking Google Code. If you read the linked article, they are talking a new thing Google "Cloud Source Repositories".

https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/

Haven't had a change to review it yet but seems to be they retired Google Code in preparation for this, not because they were acquiescing the market to Github.

They describe it as "fully-featured private Git repositories" so not a replacement for Google code. Also it's pretty inconceivable they'd retire Google Code early, forcing repos to move to a competitor, then introduce a new public service.

I agree that we at Gitlab should do something about the memory leaks and I created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13241

What do you mean with other weirdness?

Google's Cloud Source Repositories [1] aren't related to Google Code if I get it right.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/

They mention Google Cloud Source Repositories as a recent concurrent of GitHub: https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/

I've heard a lot of people complaining about JIRA and so on, but I've never really understood why they hate it. Sure, it's closed source, but so is GitHub, and people seem to like that (this discussion notwithstanding).

https://notabug.org

You got downvoted by people promoting the companies they work for. Altasian stuff is hideous and Gitlab I heard is a horror show.

This will be downvoted too but honestly who cares. Despite all of Github's problems no one comes anywhere close in terms of adoption and developer mindshare and there is a reason for that.

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