for anyone new to gitlab, it is a bear. even their own cluster/HA documentation is mostly just a thin roadmap to a final goal. a statement of intent if you will. There are just far too many moving parts in this software and the glaring problem of "ruby doesnt scale well" is everpresent. packaged releases depend entirely on a bundled chef installation to get everything out the door and running.

The software tries to do too much. CI/wiki/code review/git/container repository/analytics package.

CI sharding per team and carving up gitlab into departments and groups has been my only solution so far, and its just distributed risk at that. its the difference between the unix ethos of do one thing and do it well, versus the F35 approach of do everything forever.

    > and the glaring problem of "ruby doesnt scale well" is everpresent

I remember installing GitLab on a small NAS-type box. It was a while ago, but on each start-up it ran a nodejs tool to pre-compile some assets, I suppose. On that machine, it took 10-15 minutes to start. Afterwards, the unicorn workers kept getting killed because the default memory limit (128 MB) wasn't enough to process more than literally a couple of requests. It did work, but pages took 2-5 seconds to load, which I couldn't stand.

For anyone needing a small Git Web UI, I suggest https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea.

EDIT: Oh, you're that guy ^^;.

Anyway, my rant was probably a bit harsh. I know that GitLab isn't really written for hardware comparable to a Raspberry Pi and that it's used by small and large teams all over the world. But on my hardware Gitea renders pages in 20-100 ms, which is orders of magnitude faster than GitLab. I'm sure part of this is the fault of the language.

But be aware, gitea (like gogs) does NOT cache SQL queries, so you are heavily limited by that. I can’t get it to serve > 200 pageloads per second on my system, while even a normal Grails projects manages to serve 3000 (with more complicated queries).