Ask HN: Did GitHub UI become unbearably slow? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did GitHub UI become unbearably slow?

14 pointszaphodias10 comments

I remember being able to review even large PRs (70-100 files changed) from the web UI fairly easily, but now every time I click a button, the page becomes unresponsive for many seconds.

For what it's worth (excluding client-side issues), I have a high-speed internet connection and a last-gen CPU.

Things that are very slow (from 5 to 60 seconds depending on the number of items) for me:

- Clicking on "Pull requests" tab for any repo

- Opening a PR with many comments (50+)

- Opening "Files changed" tab from inside any PR

- Marking a file as "viewed" from the "Files changed" tab

Tips I found to mitigate this:

- Opening the link in a new tab often usually only takes half the time than navigating in your current page.

- Review PRs from the visual studio code web ui (github.dev), easily accessible by pressing "." while viewing a PR

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GitHub used to be server-side rendered. This is the consequence of drinking the client side framework koolaid.

One could argue about how react makes it easier for big orgs to work together or whatever. But, when the whole point of the product is to be a robust productivity tool for developers and they can't do basic tasks without getting frustrated, it doesn't matter. The entire product could become irrelevant if someone exploits this weakness. Speed is a killer feature in a market where few understand how to actually provide it (or have the courage to preserve it).

This is why I like SourceHut. It's fast, lean, js-free, shows only what's important on screen.

The only downside is that I now need to juggle between two git servers that don't make mirroring easy. But if (when) Microsoft decides to do something stupid, I at least have an escape hatch.

A lot of big websites, e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, GitHub, have become really bad and sometimes unusable in the past year or two. I think it's mainly due to using unnecessarily complex frontend frameworks and the low quality of code generated by LLMs. It's a vibe.

Possibly related to them just adding stricter rate limits, because AI scrapers won't stop pissing in the pool?

https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-updated-rate-limits...

Just to be clear, I am authenticated. Maybe they are struggling with the AI scrapers though, you're right.

Yes, when navigating a repo's files on an older computer, I noticed that it took an incredible length of time to rehydrate pages or whatever it's doing.

Earlier this morning they "temporarily rate banned" me after clicking a total of 3 files in some repository.

May be related, or maybe not.

I like IntelliJ’s Github plugin for reviewing PRs. It’s nice for adding bookmarks and code folding.

At first it was only too slow on mobile.

Did you add node_modules to your repo by chance?

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