The UI on Github absolutely does change, about once a year they've done some small or even large changes to how Github looks and behaves. For me personally, I spend quite a bit of time looking for the right tab I want to navigate to and while I'm not lost, it takes along time to scan the UI and find what I'm looking for. I've preferd Gitlab's interface for the last few years over github simply because how much faster I can find everything.

One big thing gitlab has that github doesn't is the ability to download (or clone I think)repositories from a mobile browser without changing to desktop view. Yes there are actual reasons why someone would want to do this.

Maybe I'm blind, but I've scoured the mobile page for a download or clone link and always ended up giving up and switching to desktop view. I just checked again, and couldn't find them after a few minute search. On gitlab, it's immediately visible just above the clone repository link on the main repository page.

Coming from Bitbucket, Gitlab (self-hosted) felt blazing fast. But to be fair, any single tool feels snappy when stacked against an Atlassian product.

Also, the UX on bitbucket is very convoluted, to me at least.

My current team/employer uses a self hosted Atlassian stack... I only use BB to find the repo URL before immediately cloning it. I can find my way around it relatively fine, but wow is it slow to load any kind of information. Not sure how much of that is the server it’s on or the application itself.

EDIT: typo closing -> cloning it.

It's not slow anymore, we used to get 500 errors a lot on gitlab.com but that's not happened for a year or two now.

Github's never changing ui was also partly because they didn't have half the features gitlab does for a long time.

Gitlab is quite complicated to look at, it could be improved. But it's also partly because it is getting quite complicated.

I love Github's UI. I wish Github has file icons when you browse a repo just like Gitlab. Small change but this is nice.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/37624

It's not core to the product, but if you use the Octotree add-on to browse Github repos, you get the file type icons.

https://imgur.com/0yg4Mfc

My work uses self-hosted Gitlab. I occasionally get irritated with small UI changes but never have complaints about the speed.

Yep, it's still among the slowest. In terms of speed, popular source forges rank as follows:

1. SourceHut

2. Codeberg

3. GitHub

4. Pagure

5. GitLab

6. Bitbucket

Source: https://forgeperf.org/

I was curious so I ran the summary page test. Their results:

  100 SourceHut
  87 GitHub
  53 GitLab

My results:

  100 SourceHut
  87 GitHub
  20 GitLab - 1
  20 GitLab - 2
  19 GitLab - 3

I reran GitLab twice because the results seemed a little low.

I see that site is maintained by SourceHut though - are the test run from within their own DC? That could contribute to the performance score.

Very true. I'm in a different part of the country (I'm in Boston, they're in Philadelphia) and tried running the benchmarks myself about a week ago. Unfortunately, I didn't save the results, but if you take my word for it, I remember getting similar results with only slightly different numbers. Your best bet, of course, is to run the benchmarks yourself: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/forgeperf

Some other people ran the benchmarks from different places in Europe and got similar results with "nothing significantly different" from those published: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22900649

I'll try it out later today. Would be interesting to see actually because, completely anecdotally, GitLab seems faster than sr.ht in my daily usage.

Don't make the same mistake that I did! Save your results and share them with the class. :)

Here: https://report-delta.now.sh

SourceHut is still the winner of most, but GitHub is a lot faster than in the report on forgeperf.org.

I think the perceived speediness of GitHub for me can be mostly attributed to the fact they don't trigger a full page reload for every navigation. Whereas SourceHut is rendered completely server-side AFAIK.

(I meant GitHub in my previous comment, fyi.)

No, they do it in a fair way, I believe if you read the page it will tell you how they fairly measure performance between the forges.

Edit: see "Expand for details on methodology" right at the top of the page.

Yes, that explains their methodology but not the location of the hardware. If I go and run a Lighthouse audit on localhost vs. a server in Philadelphia there's going to be an inherent difference.

I remember reading that they also ran the benchmark in Germany and got similar results when first reading about this here on hn.

Anyway, it suffice to use gitlab, github, bitbucket and sourcehub for a few seconds to notice the slowness of the three first sites compared to the last one.

We didn't really need the numbers to be convinced but I hope they will produce some pressure to be faster.

Sorry, I seemed to remember they did something to make it fair, I don't recall the location. I use sr.ht and I've used the others and, for me, it feels like 'turbo mode' compared to them. Especially git pushing: it's faster than pushing to my dokku server that only I use!

Thanks for sharing this. I'm part of the team within GitLab's Quality Engineering group that is tasked with performance testing GitLab. We've been working on vastly increasing our performance testing and visibility for about just under a year now.

We know there's work to be done with GitLab's performance and it's a top priority for us moving forward. We've blogged recently on our (Quality) efforts here - https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/02/18/how-were-building-u... and you can also see all the issues we've got here - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues?label_name[]=Q....

I've been digging into these results today as a priority. While we're using different tooling (k6 and SiteSpeed respectively) and a different methodology (SourceHut is running tests with simulated low bandwidth) our tests are indeed generally showing the same pattern and I've confirmed we have issues raised to cover the problem areas.

Alongside this we identified a few gaps in our performance testing that we wanted to address immediately:

* Our File Blame page (and API) in particular was sobering to witness and we've added that into our tool's tests today (that you should be able to see in our results from tomorrow - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/quality/performance/-/wikis/Be...). We've raised 2 top priority issues for that area that will hopefully get tackled soon.

* Our file view page, with larger files, is also not as good as it should be. We've pivoted our tooling to test the worse case scenario today with a much larger file and raised an issue for it also for our dev teams.

As part of the company wide effort to improve our performance I'm always keen to see new tests being done or highlights of areas we haven't been able to cover yet so thanks again for highlighting this and hopefully you'll see our numbers continuing to improve soon!

GitHub's UI never changes?

Up until a couple years ago [1], the main tabs were in a collapsable sidebar on the right [2]. They just keep cramming more junk on the top, pushing the actual source code further below the fold, and making the header so wide it hides half its functionality inside a 'hamburger' unless you make the window super-wide.

The main GitHub.com page itself used to be clearly for developers, with "Search public git repositories" the very first item. Now it still says "for developers" but it's all about "GitHub Enterprise" and "Your business needs". Multi-repo search is actually disabled for non-logged-in users.

The style doesn't change, but the layout and functionality definitely does, and (IMHO) not for the better.

[1]: https://github.blog/2015-11-16-a-new-look-for-repositories/ [2]: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/03/23/~/media...

Never had any speed problems with self hosted Gitlab

What are the specs of your server? Bare metal or cloud/vm?

2cpu, 8GB VM. I'm not the one who deals with these, so I don't know other details.

I have no complaints, it works zippy.