It appears that the workaround is open source, though, and is loaded in the open source version?

https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/lib/gitlab/...

https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/blob/master/config/init...

Many other reasons to be concerned about performance, but there's no evidence that they're withholding essential features like this from their free version.