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Unfortunately for GitLab, they've locked themselves into a position of trying to compete directly with GitHub. If GitHub has instantly smooth transitions betwee

Unfortunately for GitLab, they've locked themselves into a position of trying to compete directly with GitHub. If GitHub has instantly smooth transitions between page loads while browsing a repository, then GitLab is going to follow suit. It's really hard to be competitive while ignoring the nagging thought that "competing requires copying the competitor".

comex 10y ago
Performance matters - a lot. It's often overlooked because its effect on users is more unconscious than consciously noticed, but even small speedups greatly affect user motivation, as measured by any number of blog posts about "page load time" and "conversions". However, "instantly smooth transitions" may not require using JavaScript. According to the blog post, GitLab observed a performance increase after ditching Turbolinks[1]. Indeed, sites that use JS to speed up page loads are often compensating for what would otherwise be an excessively slow load, due to having lots of scripts or whatnot. And that's only a partial fix: the user still experiences that slow load whenever they come in from an external site or open links in a new tab/window. If you can make "real" page loads fast, you avoid that problem. [1] ...though it doesn't seem to have been measured very scientifically - to quote from the pull request: "I thought I noticed that pageloads were a lot more snappy, and one other reviewer said the same. Not the most rigorous way to test performance, but it helps."
- irq11 10y ago
  The irony, of course, is that GitHub doesn't use any of the JS framework complexity that people here seem to think is necessary. They use jQuery and PJax. Sometimes I feel like 95% of the thrashing in the JS world is from people trying to fix the wounds inflicted by the previous Hot New Thing...
  - Touche 10y ago
    Yeah, exactly. It's amazing that so many developers use GitHub, which has excellent performance, but don't take any of its lessons with them.
jobvandervoort 10y ago
Performance is really important, especially to user experience. We want GitLab to be fast, independent of the scale it's used at. Right now, GitLab is fast and snappy for people that self-host it, but GitLab.com is not and we're not happy with that [0]. Making our front end performant is part of that and I'm happy our engineers have been working hard on that. We have been using Prometheus extensively to monitor speed of transactions on the backend and I'm seeing a strong push to more monitoring to front end monitoring as well (I owe you a link here). [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59
- sytse 10y ago
  The issue you linked to was moved to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 The performance issues we plan to work on are in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&author_username=pcarranza&label_name[]=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf...

comex 10y ago

Performance matters - a lot. It's often overlooked because its effect on users is more unconscious than consciously noticed, but even small speedups greatly affect user motivation, as measured by any number of blog posts about "page load time" and "conversions". However, "instantly smooth transitions" may not require using JavaScript. According to the blog post, GitLab observed a performance increase after ditching Turbolinks[1]. Indeed, sites that use JS to speed up page loads are often compensating for what would otherwise be an excessively slow load, due to having lots of scripts or whatnot. And that's only a partial fix: the user still experiences that slow load whenever they come in from an external site or open links in a new tab/window. If you can make "real" page loads fast, you avoid that problem. [1] ...though it doesn't seem to have been measured very scientifically - to quote from the pull request: "I thought I noticed that pageloads were a lot more snappy, and one other reviewer said the same. Not the most rigorous way to test performance, but it helps."

irq11 10y ago
The irony, of course, is that GitHub doesn't use any of the JS framework complexity that people here seem to think is necessary. They use jQuery and PJax. Sometimes I feel like 95% of the thrashing in the JS world is from people trying to fix the wounds inflicted by the previous Hot New Thing...
- Touche 10y ago
  Yeah, exactly. It's amazing that so many developers use GitHub, which has excellent performance, but don't take any of its lessons with them.

jobvandervoort 10y ago

Performance is really important, especially to user experience. We want GitLab to be fast, independent of the scale it's used at. Right now, GitLab is fast and snappy for people that self-host it, but GitLab.com is not and we're not happy with that [0]. Making our front end performant is part of that and I'm happy our engineers have been working hard on that. We have been using Prometheus extensively to monitor speed of transactions on the backend and I'm seeing a strong push to more monitoring to front end monitoring as well (I owe you a link here). [0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/59

sytse 10y ago
The issue you linked to was moved to https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 The performance issues we plan to work on are in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&author_username=pcarranza&label_name[]=performance https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&utf...