> I hear it's terribly slow

On our self-hosted instance it flies.

Using all of gitlab.com, our self-hosted instance, and github.com with some kind of regularity, I find both GH.com and GL.com equally fast (or "slow" depending on your PoV) since a year or so, and our local instance faster. Neither is rocket fast, but neither is "terribly slow" either, and at any rate they're largely in the same ballpark.

I don't think it's slow, but it is hungry, don't expect to run it on a Raspberry Pi or equivalent VM. Personally I think it's a fair tradeoff considering we use it fully (including CI, etc).

I can run a couple blogs, ftpd, mail server (smtp+starttls, imaps, pop3s), dns server, mysql, torrent server, a factorio server, etc. on rpi-equivalent hardware (some intel atom based mini desktop that uses 20W in power). What is the big deal with a git front-end? I'm a software developer and I've written software in an interpreted language (PHP and Python) that runs on that computer for that computer, and it's plenty fast for this. It might not be able to handle things like realtime video encoding and streaming, or other things involving crypto (I'd like to run a Tor relay but I can't), but a git front-end... that's not heavy.

Gitlab is not just a git frontend, it's a full development "suite". It includes Issues management, CI/CD server, deployment tools with integrated monitoring (using Prometheus), a chat server (Mattermost), a web-based editor, a container registry, and probably a bit more I'm not remembering.

Issues management is a script as heavy as a BBS system from the 80s. CI/CD totally depends on whatever you're building, so they can hardly include that in system requirements. Monitoring I don't use, so that shouldn't impact performance for me. Chat server is Mattermost, that's not a mandatory dependency I should hope? Anyway, wouldn't use it, so not applicable either. Container registry... a registry doesn't sound like much? But again, not applicable. I don't know why 4GB RAM is the absolute minimum for Gitlab.

All I want is a Github alternative: something which allows people to clone (be it http(s) or git smart something), do pull requests, have an issue tracker, view files online and show pretty markdown documents. I'm half inclined to go the usual route and write it myself, but I should first google around. Someone mentioned Gitea to me: that project claims to be lightweight so it might already fit the bill.