Hi, Engineering Manager at GitLab here, Source Code team.

Thanks for the comment.

Indeed that is something we've had in our minds for a long time. Over the past months/years, we have been shipping out incremental improvements in the way we handle and render large MR diffs.

Recently we made the loading happen in batches which resulted in a significant improvement in how fast we start showing the diffs. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1816

We plan to continue improving the performance of the MR page, lowering memory footprint this Q2 as well as providing other ways to enhance the experience.

Some examples:

* Commit navigation, to help commit by commit review: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/28596

* File by file mode of reviewing MRs, including the concept of "unread diffs": https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/516

We're constantly looking to improve and learn more about the struggles of our users. If you have further thoughts, please drop a comment in one of the issues and epics above and tag me (@andr3).

If some of your problems are not covered by these, feel free to open an issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab) and tag me as well.

Again, thanks for the feedback.