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Comment by macinjosh | Hacker News Reader

I am a happy gitlab.com user. However, with all of this week's news I decided to see what it would take to run my own GitLab instance. I was surprised to find that on Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail the one-click GitLab installs required an instance that costs ~$40 per month just for me, one user. Any cheaper/smaller instances were to anemic to run GitLab at all. Seems like there are some performance issues to deal with there.

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> the one-click GitLab installs required an instance that costs ~$40 per month just for me, one user

Maybe the Digital Ocean 1-click install requires this... but GitLab will run on a Raspberry Pi 2[1]... which is pretty darn low specs.

From the GitLab minimum requirements, it basically just needs 1 cpu core, and 1 GB of ram, plus some swap (if you go that low in ram)[2]

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/installation/#raspberry-pi-2

[2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html#cpu

GitLab is a Rails app, what did you expect? /s We use gitea (written in Go), it runs well on more modest hardware.

Why the sarcasm? Rails is a pig.

Probably because GitHub is also built on Rails.

I wonder if there's a chance GitLab will be rewritten in a more efficient language.

GitLab VPE here. We are starting to re-write performance intensive part of our application in Golang. E.g. our Gitaly project: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly

That's awesome. Great choice of a language. We just moved to Gitlab internally (we were actually starting to do so before the MSFT news). Very happy so far. Looking forward to speed improvements.

GitLab VPE here. We're working on Dockerized version that will run in a Kubernetes cluster, which should make this easier, assuming you've already made that investment in your infrastructure.

More pertinent to your concern about cost: It should make it easier for PaaS' who are k8s-based to run it for you and perhaps provide a lower price point.

Bitbucket On-Prem (aka Bitbucket Server) is pure Java + direct git invocations, so runs very nicely on modest hardware. Can get by on 1GB RAM! (But more recommended if you have more than 10 users).

Doesn't it require Tomcat, Apache, Postgres/MySQL? I've recently installed Jira Core and Confluece for a client and they hardly seem lightweight web apps.

I run a small gitlab instance on a $14/mo OVH instance and have been quite happy. I used to run on the smaller version and it was still OK.

For a small instance, I get away with running an instance of Gitea on a 2.49€/mo VPS.

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