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Comment by bureaucrat | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab is slow. It’s so unbearably slow, even their official server. Guys, why should a static content load after page loading is done? Page loading done, and the code still loads with a loading circle. Why? Just compare it with github. Average 500ms makes a huge difference.

Also gitlab UI is a huge mess. It got all the features, sure. But the UI is not that user friendly. Don’t use flat the wrong way. Use contrasts for buttons PLEASE. Github is sort of flat and their interface is great with adequate use of contrasts.

https://imgur.com/a/EIlV7ri

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Thank you for the feedback. We aren't happy with performance and we are working hard to improve it. We have two major projects under way, switching to Puma (https://docs.gitlab.com/omnibus/settings/puma.html) as well as reducing the overall memory consumption of GitLab (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/development/en...).

You can follow along on some of the progress we are making in each release post in the "Performance Improvements" section. For 12.2 you can see we had 58 MR's related to performance: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/merge_requests?scope=....

On the UX front, two efforts under way are establishing experience baselines (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/experience-...) as well as a common design system (https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/ux/pajamas-des...). Hopefully these efforts allow us to look at our UX holistically, and to focus on making high quality components that are used throughout the product.

Again thanks for the feedback, and hopefully we will have some more concrete improvements here soon.

With those harsh comments being said, I use self hosted gitlab and I am thrilled to see your product improve.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks, and please keep up the feedback. =)

> even their official server.

Annecdata, but to me it seems more like their official server is the slow part, I run my own instance and it seems pretty snappy.

From what I have heard from users and customers, the self-hosted folks are indeed super duper happy. The nice thing about the self-hosted option is that regardless of how open an employer company maybe about sending data places, devs can try out the product. That's led to our super awesome enterprise adoption to some degree (IMHO).

Tbf, GitHub is (at least in my opinion) also slowly overcomplicating its UI with all the new features they add

True, but gitlab already did that :(

Agreed

Thank you for the feedback!

We are currently working on addressing performance, having a dedicated workstream for testing and measuring performance across the different GitLab versions.

Our plan is to publish the results across the versions as they have gone through testing. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/quality/performance/wikis/Benc...

We currently test for latency, I will take the average 500MS feedback to the team.

We have already identified slow endpoints with high latency so they can be improved. E.g:

* https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/66696 * https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/65323

I’m on fast network, and it took at least 10 seconds(!) to load your link. I saw a loading circle under ‘assignee’ sidebar for like 7 seconds.

I was so shocked that I re-visited the page in incognito mode. 10+ seconds of waiting happened again.

Hope the improvement goes well.

Thanks for the feedback, I am in the US west and the link seems to load faster. This latency could be geo location related.

If you don't mind can you please share the area you are located (roughly), I will bring this feedback to our infrastructure team.

Yeah speed is the only reason why i won't give Gitlab another try. All these features are great. But i don't believe they will help them with market share until they have addressed the speed issue.

After August was filled with performance related problems on gitlab.com, they actually managed to fix a quite a lot of inefficiencies and more to come.

Plus you can make it as fast as you want if self-hosing is an option by throwing more hardware at it.

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