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Comment by zyxley | Hacker News Reader

> It's only missing critical mass

As somebody who loves Gitlab... no, what it's missing is Github's reputation of lasting uptime reliability. If they get it to the point where people trust it to always be up to the same extent as Github, the rest will follow.

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We're not there yet but uptime is a lot better than two months ago (we can deal with Azure now, PostgreSQL and Redis are HA). But file storage is still a single point of failure, we're looking into moving to Ceph https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1

We're focussed right now on making GitLab.com faster. Issues got 3 times faster yesterday https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42#note_3670...

These candid posts about operational issues are _much_ appreciated. Kudos! We need a viable competitor to GitHub and I think you might be one of them!

Thanks lomnakkus

That's one of the definitions of critical mass. Reputation is built up over time and usage. Gitlab's uptime reliability isn't particularly known or unknown, mostly because, compared to Github, it's not used enough for those issues to come up.

Try talking to a dev, ask them why they use Github instead of Gitlab. Are they going to tell you "Oh I absolutely would use Gitlab but their uptime is such a problem"? Or are they going to tell you their stuff's already on Github? Their friends/coworkers are on Github? Their employers look for their Github profile?

As a sidenote I would totally use MySpace instead of Facebook if not for their notable history of extended downtime...

I partly agree, but those that have done the research or already use Gitlab know that Gitlab's uptime has been problematic compared to Github's, which is a bigger issue for most companies than the community. As sytse correctly notes below, it's a lot better than it was a few months ago - but the pessimistic/risk-averse way to say that is "as recently as two months ago they were having major uptime issues". I have high hopes for Gitlab and I think they're doing great things, it's always great to see new competition in the space. And I applaud their transparency, it's refreshing! But it'll require some more "burn in" time before I consider it a reliable Github replacement, all questions of critical mass aside.

On the plus side, if the manage to fix their problems at some point people will start trusting them to be up. It is not set in stone that they have worse uptime.

Absolutely, and I do think most of their problems have been fixed. So it's just a matter of time - the longer they are stable, the better their reputation will become.

> Try talking to a dev, ask them why they use Github instead of Gitlab. Are they going to tell you "Oh I absolutely would use Gitlab but their uptime is such a problem"? Or are they going to tell you their stuff's already on Github? Their friends/coworkers are on Github? Their employers look for their Github profile?

Just as an alternative point of view, a shop I knew used self-hosted gitlab in preference to github, because they were in China. That was actually how I learned about gitlab.

FYI - We have been running GitLab internally for over a year, we have not had a single crash or unscheduled down time, not even once. The only few things we had was that prior to about 6 months ago we noticed a lot of regressions after a major upgrade, i.e. small things not working but they weren't show stoppers, I spoke with a few people at GL about it and they were fantastic, they immediately set off a program to improve testing quality and in the last 3 months we've upgraded the day each new release has come out (weekly now I think?) and haven't had any problems that we've noticed.

Just FTR: This was an issue for me too.

(Well, there are quite a few weird UI decisions that also pushed me away, but they're minor in the grand scheme of things.)

EDIT: It wasn't my problem per se, but one of my users who had a problem downloading things for at least "several" hours. As this project isn't very popular to start with that's a comparatively huge loss.

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