GitLab's RAM requirements have increased considerably and we now recommend 4GB. It still runs on a RasPi2 but it is not a great experience. We would love help running GitLab with Puma so that it is still fast if you have little memory https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3592

Out of curiosity, how much of a difference would Puma make in terms of memory usage once available (specifically at the low end, i.e. for teams of less than 5 members)? And would you happen to have a rough idea of which features are the biggest contributors to the high memory usage of GitLab?

Being able to comfortably host a limited version of GitLab for a small team on the lowest tier of Digital Ocean or EC2 instances (<512MB) would be a game changer in terms of the accessibility of GitLab as a product. It would give you access to the long tail of potential privacy-conscious users who would like to avoid hosting their code on a SaaS service (and thus wouldn't be already captured by the market leader, GitHub), but might be put off by the high operational costs involved with self-hosting a GitLab instance compared to some of the lighter weight alternatives.

This depends on the amount of memory a Puma setup would use vs an equivalent Unicorn setup. Say you have determined you need e.g 10 Unicorn workers, each taking 300 MB. If you could handle the same traffic using 1 Puma process with 10 threads that means you just saved yourself ~2.7 GB of RAM.

It's entirely possible that a single Puma process may end up using more memory than a single Unicorn process, so the only way to know for certain is to measure the difference.

There are people at GitLab that know more, but my take is that it would make it more practical to run with 1GB.

As listed in https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html the minimum is 1GB "1GB RAM + 3GB of swap is the absolute minimum but we strongly advise against this amount of memory. See the unicorn worker section below for more advice."

Most of the memory for the configuration of 4GB we recommend is to run extra unicorn workers https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/install/requirements.html#unicorn... You would save this memory because you can multithread one worker.

You should look at gitea ! It's much simpler than gitlab, but is also much more lightweight in terms of resource usage. Used it succesfully to host my startup's git.

If all you need is a server to host a bunch of git repos, there is also gitolite. http://gitolite.com/gitolite/

It doesn't have a pretty interface, but it works, and its requirements are minimal. I've had good success using it to host student repos in my classes for about 4 years.

Yeah, they’ve added more features which end up using more memory. For the small version you’re talking about you might look at gogs.io. Haven’t used it, but I hear good things.

Just for the record, I believe most of the community has moved from Gogs to Gitea (a fork) because of management issues in the original project.

Huh?

Gogs is fine.

People, for whatever reason, think devs have to continue adding more and more features otherwise they see the project as "dead". It's not.

In my opinion the Gitea folks are creating a bloated version of Gogs. YMMV.

My understanding was that the maintainer of Gogs had stopped replying to any issues/PRs for a period of a few weeks and refused to add any other maintainers to the project, so people wanted to fork and ensure that it'd always have an active maintainer.

https://blog.gitea.io/2016/12/welcome-to-gitea/

He did have some periods of inactivity. He didn't want to add other maintainers because he wanted to keep the code quality as good he wanted as far as I know and that's also why he didn't accept pr's, because the code quality wasn't good enough for him.

He was also totally ok with the fork to gitea.

Gitea exists so that more features can be added faster, not necessarily keeping the code quality ideal.

I prefer gogs. Better documentation. Original author.

For many more features I use gitlab. With gogs I'm looking for simplicity.

It may or may not help with the requirements, but when I was using it 6mo - 1yr ago you could definitely disable "extras" like wiki, issue management, etc. It was nice to simplify things for users and keep them from splitting info between that and your company's solutions for things like issue management.

Yes, you can disable what you don't need. For example you can even disable the repository and have just an issue tracker.