Not sure why Gitlab is still not able to scale the platform.
I run Gitlab on a 2 CPU 4GB RAM VM and it performs very well(even with fairly large repos). There is also the known issue with Gitlab CE itself being resource intensive, but in the case of the version hosted on Gitlab it seems to be a scaling issue.
Resource contention and noisy neighbors require incredibly sophisticated systems to work around.
Automating many smaller, isolated systems is much easier. This is another trend that will affect the SaaS model.
Actually the biggest problem is actually RoR which Gitlab is based on, it offers a very limited performance compared against others. Even if you split, you still need more servers on ruby than you would've needed for C#, Java, C++ or whatever is closer to the metal.
Lots of performance, minimal operations.
Easy to manage tons of installs of this software.
It's not impossible to scale RoR and Postgres but there are architectures that are far easier.
For the RoR application servers we can (and did) just spin up more machines https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/29/look-into-gitlab-infrast...
The point of the comment was to show that Gitlab performs well when there are appropriate server resources, hence the reason for Gitlab.com not performing well is because it has not been scaled up/out or both.
But the problem is this is expensive (we have 100k+ users) and people can't collaborate easily (you need a new account for each server).