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Comment by vincentdm | Hacker News Reader

Funny thing is that they publicly own up to their performance problems in an unusual way: in their comparison with GitHub (https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/) they list "Fast page load" as a feature that GitLab lacks and GitHub has.

Nevertheless, the slowness is really annoying, especially because their product is so good on all other accounts. If scaling their database can help speed things up, I bet they will be glad to remove this embarrassing "missing feature".

In marketing terms, having fast page load would be called a "qualifier". For example: you expect a hotel to provide toilet paper. You won't pick any hotel because of it, but you will surely avoid one that doesn't.

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The good news is that page loads are much better now. Our initial page load ping http://stats.pingdom.com/81vpf8jyr1h9/1902794 is better than GitHub.com http://stats.pingdom.com/81vpf8jyr1h9/1902795

We got work to do in the 99% and merge request page load but the overall situation has improve dramatically.

We still got work to do in availability, so I changed the 'feature' to reflect this https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/3b3bddf5...

Another GitLabber here.

We just kicked off a major effort to address the availability issue Sid mentions above. The highlights are that we're moving to GCP which should provide better underlying reliability. But interestingly we found that only about ~20% of our downtime minutes where from underlying infrastructure. Whereas ~70% came from features that didn't scale.

So the more exciting part of the project is to tighten the feedback loop between development and deployment with a continuous delivery pipeline. This may be obvious to some people, but it's harder to pull off when you've got an open source project, an on-prem product, and a large-scale SaaS sharing the same code base. I'm calling it "Open-core SaaS" and there are only a handful of companies that run a large, multi-tenant service based on an open source project.

Maybe I just can't find it, but what URLs are pingdom.com checking? Do both issues have the same content? Or does one have 50 comments and another has 1?

These are checking https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/issues/1 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/1

The one on GitLab is considerably longer.

That's probably the best "feature comparison" page I've ever seen. (At least, the best written by a creator of one of the products being compared.)

Thanks! We try to keep it fair. I love that our marketing team is on board with listing our missing features very publicly https://about.gitlab.com/features/#missing

> 2/3 of Enterprises Use GitLab

wow that a lot higher that i would have expected. Linked bitrise page used " randomly selected 10,000 apps as a base, that are getting built regularly on Bitrise" , not "enterprises".

How did you comeup with 2/3 number? First line of your about page is a lie?

I love that they do though... It's so honest, and it gives me the feeling that I can trust that that might be the biggest of their problems, and not something else they don't want to talk about it.

>In marketing terms, having fast page load would be called a "qualifier".

"Table stakes" is a common term for this.

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