Which is why I personally use Gitea, which is super light and performs very well. But it only has a fraction of the features of GitLab so it's not an apples to apples comparison, but my personal projects and my friends it works just fine. I combine it with Drone for testing and it totally suits my needs, and I host everything myself on a $5 VPS.

We use GitLab on prem at work because we want the features. For private stuff or super small teams I'd chose Gitea as well. And/or GitLab.com.

GitLab's performance is a major pain point for us. We throw an absurd amount of hardware at it for mid sized teams.

same here, gitea works for probably 90% of the users IMO, I use it to host everything these days. tried gitlab a couple of times in the past, not impressed by the performance yet.

have not used drone yet, will give it a shot.

Bitbucket. It's cheap.

They have a dedicated section about performance improvements in the release notes.

It links to a list of 53 commits from this release targeting performance:

https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/merge_requests?scope=...

Thanks Scott for linking to that. We're very much trying to improve the performance of GitLab.

I do think that most of our performance improvements are to improve the end-user experience. So I totally understand dijit's request to reduce memory. Today we recommend 4GB of memory to run GitLab https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html#memory

One big thing would be if we can run the Ruby code multithreaded https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3592 You can see I created that issue 2 years ago and there has been recent activity on it.

Right now GitLab the company is focussed on making complete DevOps https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/11/from-dev-to-devops/ happening. So any help on the multi-threading is appreciated. The first thing would be to implement https://github.com/covermymeds/rubocop-thread_safety

Are there any plans or targets to lower the memory requirement?

Apart from everyone wanting to see multithreading happen there is no target or date.

It might be worth mentioning that they use jemalloc which greedily allocates memory. I "found out" while running into an issue and disabled it[1] which shaved a fair amount of memory from allocation. At the end of the day I guess it didn't matter - for me - seeing how I didn't need that memory for anything else.

Also, the cookbook for setting up postgres also takes your total ram into account.

1: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/omnibus-gitlab/issues/3313

jemalloc does not greedily allocate memory, and it's not clear to me how you would think so from reading that gitlab issue discussion. I can well imagine jemalloc not behaving as desired under certain conditions, but if so it's surely more involved than wanton naivete.

I explained poorly. I ran into issues with updating jemalloc as part of a software update. While debugging the issue I disabled jemalloc (unsetting the ld_preload) and noticied a sharp difference in how much memory ruby had allocated. I guess _pre_allocating is incorrect and a better explanation is _not releasing it_. Thanks for rebutting my argument and giving me the opportunity to elaborate.

Agreed. I really would prefer to use Gitlab, but at the moment I'm using Gogs on my Linode instance because it runs smoothly in <1GB of RAM.

That's what I've been using and idk if I need that much many features. Gogs gives me https+ssh, and a proper sane ui to quickly create accounts and config things. It's so lightweight I don't see me migrating to bigger stuff anytime soon.

Any clue on what gitlab-only features people need that makes Gogs unusable or unfitting? make me really curious

There's the whole CI part. Gitea miss code comments for code review. Gitlab also have project management tools like issue boards And surely some other things i haven't looked into

Gitea definitely do less but do it well and much in a much lighter way

It may be coming in the near future: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/pull/3748

For the past few years, I've been successfully running Gitolite[1] on a server with 1GB RAM. I recently checked out Gitlab as I thought it would be useful to have a nice web interface that allows users to easily see what projects are hosted and their corresponding URLs. I had to back away when I learned of Gitlab’s resource requirements.

Based on the sibling comments here, it looks like Gogs/Gitea should do what I want.

[1]: http://gitolite.com/gitolite/index.html

I switch to gogs (and now gitea) for this reason 2 years ago.

It does much less in term of features though