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The Github website is slow everywhere. It is truly a piece of shit software both in terms of performance but also UX/UI and everything in between. It's a produ
by PedroBatista 1y ago
The Github website is slow everywhere. It is truly a piece of shit software both in terms of performance but also UX/UI and everything in between.
It's a product of many cooks and their brilliant ideas and KPIs, a social network for devs and code being the most "brilliant" of them all. For day to day dev operations is something so mediocre even Gitlab looks like the golden standard compared to Github.
And no, the problem is not "Rails" or [ insert any other tech BS to deflect the real problems ].
- bob1029 1y ago> And no, the problem is not "Rails" The problem is they abandoned rails for react. The old SSR GitHub experience was very good. You could review massive PRs on any machine before they made the move.
- DrBenCarson 1y agoWell yeah, but just imagine how much money they’re saving by delivering a subpar experience!
- gchamonlive 1y agoOr how much money they are capturing in investiments or corporate deals because of the tech stack
- zozbot234 1y agoThey're not even saving any money. Syntax highlighting is a trivial workload, whereas the average SPA spends a lot of time in pointless roundtrips that have the server send more data down the pipe than the SSR equivalent.
- sidewndr46 1y agoI'll play devils advocate - does it save them some storage space or bandwidth in the CDN that delivers Github?
- Asmod4n 1y agoThat's a good question, without looking into any of the code id say bandwidth cost goes higher when moving away from server side rendering since you have to send the code for client side rending to each client which connects.
- scrollaway 1y agoSending data is what’s trivial compared to compute… syntax highlighting is not trivial workload compared to that, you don’t know what you’re saying.
- sgarland 1y agoYou say that, until you’re one of the unlucky people who discover that cloud DBs are just cloud VMs in disguise, and those cloud VMs have network throughput limits. A fun part of a retro at my company last year was me explaining to a team, “had all of your pods’ requests succeeded, the DB would have been pushing out well over 200 Gbps, which is generally reserved for top-of-rack switches.” Of course, someone else then had to translate that into “4K Blu-Rays per second,” because web devs aren’t typically familiar with networking, racks, data centers…
- scrollaway 1y agoServing static files off highly efficient, distributed CDNs is a solved problem. There's no "4K blu-rays per second" when you're talking about gzipped, highly cacheable text data. If github has a million users visiting it per day on a FRESH cache, and all of them have to download at least 10 megabytes of text data (both of these numbers are far too high), you are at ... 0.015 "4k blurays per second". Yeah I think MS's datacenters will survive.
- zozbot234 1y agoA single-page app is not serving "static files". It might serve an initial bundle, but literally everything after that is dynamically generated. There's no way you could serve those responses via a CDN.
- Elfener 1y agoI guess if you say "we've made the UX worse" instead of "we've reduced costs but made the UX worse" to shareholders, they think of cost savings regardless.
- agos 1y agoif you look at the thread, the explanation is not this easy, as much as it's satisfying to blame React (or any other single tech)
- bob1029 1y agoYou're right. The technology is not necessarily flawed. It is more about the people who decided to use it and the way in which they used it.
- agos 1y agoexactly. I don't want to do a "no true scotsman" to defend React, but circumstantial evidence suggests that they wildly misused the tool
- throw-the-towel 1y agoA tool that lends itself to misuse so easily is a bad tool, period.
- agos 1y agowhy do you say "easily"? it took them considerable effort to make that atrocity, I'm pretty sure. The fact that tens of people worked on this and yet this is the result is way more telling of the team and company culture than it is of the specific tool.
- sgarland 1y agoNot necessarily. Sharp tools are often sharp because someone needs it. I’m not a frontend dev, and have next to zero experience with anything beyond jQuery, but an analogy is shell. Bash (and zsh, though I find some of its syntactic sugar nicer, albeit still inscrutable) will happily let you do extremely stupid things, but it also lets you do extremely complicated things in a very concise manner. That doesn’t mean it’s inherently bad, it means you need to know what the hell you’re doing, and use linters, write tests, etc.
- 1y ago
- a-french-anon 1y agoWe were very few to rant about it, 1 year ago: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62372 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62372 Their "solution" was to enable SSR for us ranters' accounts.
- bob1029 1y ago> Server-side rendering (SSR) flag has been enabled for each of you. Can you take a look, click around and let me know if this has resolved some of the usability issues that you've reported here? The fact that they have this ability / awareness and haven't completely reverted by now is shocking to me.
- adithyassekhar 1y agoHonestly that's wild. This should be an option in their settings.
- Dragonai 1y agoThis is actually unreal. Wow.
- galangalalgol 1y agoA handful have replied to the two year old thread asking to have the same flag flipped. That seems unlikely to work, but why not ask?
- Zanfa 1y agoI’m pretty sure they used to do syntax highlighting on the server before and it was fast. Now they send down unhighlighted text that seems to choke the browser with anything but the smallest diffs.
- sidewndr46 1y agoWhoever had a KPI for improving server performance and decreasing cost got their promotion that quarter, that is for sure.
- tempest_ 1y agoServers cost money, the client is free (and pays you sometimes)!
- const_cast 1y agoThe client costs money too, opportunity cost. Which, unfortunately, cannot be measured :( so no KPIs. Darn! Its all fun and games until you cut quality over and over so much your customers just leave. Ask Chrysler or GE. I mean they must have saved, what, billions across decades? And for free! Well... um... not free actually, because those companies have been run into the ground, dragged through hell, revived, and then damned again.
- RedShift1 1y agoMBA's ruin everything
- jeltz 1y agoOpportunity costs is something they are taught about in school but somehow seem to always forget about. I think it is more a question about incentives for the roles MBAs are usually hired into. Either that or the lack of knowledge of the actual product makes them too detached.
- shiomiru 1y ago> The problem is they abandoned rails for react. Which, it seems, was a result of the M$ acquisition: https://muan.co/posts/javascript https://muan.co/posts/javascript
- sunaookami 1y agofyi this page detects a hacker news referrer and sends you in an infinite loop. Have to open the link via copy-paste.
- adithyassekhar 1y agoLol I respect that https://muan.co/no-yc/ https://muan.co/no-yc/
- NetOpWibby 1y agoBased tbh
- whstl 1y agoI love the explanation in the linked site: > Writing on the internet can be a two-way thing, a learning experience guided by iteration and feedback. I’ve learned some bad habits from Hacker News. I added Caveats sections to articles to make sure that nobody would take my points too broadly. I edited away asides and comments that were fun but would make articles less focused. I came to expect pedantic, judgmental feedback on everything I wrote, regardless of what it was. https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news https://macwright.com/2022/09/15/hacker-news Which is true. Pedantism is the lowest form of pseudo-intelligence.
- MereInterest 1y ago> Pedantism is the lowest form of pseudo-intelligence. You can’t just lay this bear trap of an opportunity and expect me to not pedantically state that the word is either “pedantry”, the activity performed by pedants, or “pedantic”, to describe such activities. “Pedantism” would be a philosophy or viewpoint that extols pedantry. Pedantism would be to pedantry as deontology is to rule-following, a justification of an activity. As such, pedantism would be a slightly higher form of pseudo-intelligence than mere pedantry. But only slightly.
- sleepybrett 1y agoThe problem is that they deprioritized everything for more copilot bullshit.
- baxuz 1y agoReact is always the problem, as using it in a performant way requires you to basically eject from using it, relying on it only for syncing state, like video key frames. There are of course performant react apps out there. What Steve did with tldraw is amazing. However, the vast majority of the apps out there are garbage since the framework itself is terribly inefficient.
- selfmodruntime 1y agoYou can easily do this very fast in React if you don‘t fuck it up. They did fuck it up a bit.
- catigula 1y agoReact isn't the problem, the problem is literally every dev I've ever worked with who writes react good except for one or two don't understand or care how to write performant react code at all.
- sgarland 1y agoGlad it’s not just me having faulty memory. I was reading a file - not a PR, just a file in our codebase - that was pretty large, like 15K lines, and it was dogshit slow. I was astonished, and thought I had remembered it being much snappier years ago. Meanwhile, I opened a 100K line CSV in Neovim and while it took a couple of seconds to open and render highlighting, after that, it was fine.
- Roark66 1y agoYes, I came here to say this exact thing. Also github search sucks bad as well as the way it shows diffs. My current client has just moved from bitbucket to GH and all the devs are up in arms.
- bethekidyouwant 1y agoWhere is it good?
- hk1337 1y agoEmbedding gists and not fully implementing using dark or light mode annoys me. It's there but it just always has the theme set to light with no way to override the value. At the very least, I wish they set it to auto.
- jayd16 1y agoOk so what's a good example?
- aaomidi 1y agoGerrit
- leosanchez 1y agoIt is faster than GitLab, at least to me.
- PedroBatista 1y agoIs your deployment SaaS or running on your company servers? Gitlab is anything but light, by default tends to be slow, but surprisingly fast with a good server ( nothing crazy, but big ) and caching.
- leosanchez 1y agoJust gitlab.com.
- hk1337 1y agoIt's probably not related to the speed and I am not entirely certain how Github stores the repository but I noticed Gitlab does something weird to the bare repository so it's not directly usable as a bare repository. Gitea is an example I like because it stores the repository as a bare repository, the same as if I did git clone --bare. I bring it up because when I stopped running Gitea, I could easily go in to the data and backup all the repositories an easily reuse them somewhere else.
- pxc 1y agoGitLab and GitHub both use custom storage backends for git for reasons of scale. GitLab: https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/gitaly/praefect/ https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/gitaly/praefect/ GitHub: https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/stretching-spokes/ https://github.blog/engineering/infrastructure/stretching-sp...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tpoacher 1y agotruly worthy of an acquisition from MS then
- ssttoo 1y agoAfter 10 years of using Phabricator at a previous company I am still shocked how bad GitHub is. This the industry standard?! Too bad Phabricator is maintenance-only now https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phabricator
- accrual 1y agoLooks like a new community developed fork of Phabricator is up! I've never used it but glad to see the project continues. https://we.phorge.it/ https://we.phorge.it/
- bityard 1y agoI tried poking around but it looks like you have to be logged into to view the source, and registration requires manual approval. :/ I assume this is fallout from dealing with LLM content scrapers.
- mormegil 1y agoYes, exactly. Even though you can clone the git repos anonymously, or look at the Github mirror. https://we.phorge.it/phame/post/view/8/anonymous_cloning_disabled_on_phorge.it/ https://we.phorge.it/phame/post/view/8/anonymous_cloning_dis... https://we.phorge.it/phame/post/view/9/anonymous_cloning_has_been_re-enabled/ https://we.phorge.it/phame/post/view/9/anonymous_cloning_has...
- anon7000 1y agoI, for one, despised phabricator (in comparison to GitHub) when I had to use it last. But that was at least 50% from also having to use svn
- willvarfar 1y agoI only used phabricator on a side project that other devs, with meta history, had set up. And although not a heavy user, I rather liked it for being very basic which I thought was a very good thing. My memory is fuzzy but I think it was on phab that I discovered and loved to use stacked merges. This is where you have a merge request into another open merge request etc. Super useful. Miss that in the git world.
- ori_b 1y agoIt's frustrating, because GitHub used to perform quite well, before it was a single page app.
- fkyoureadthedoc 1y agoclicking around GitHub and checking network panel, it seems to load plenty of server rendered HTML. Some views seem to use React within the page, but it doesn't appear to be a React SPA.
- ori_b 1y agoMaybe I should have said pre-react. I don't know what GitHub did specifically, but several years ago it used to be reasonably fast and relatively pleasant to use. It regressed a lot over the last few years, seemingly correlated with attempts at interactive features.
- lenkite 1y agoGithub's Primer design system was wonderful when it was a pure CSS system that could be used with any framework. Sadly, M$ killed that and made the new Primer design system shitty-React consumption only.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago"The Github website is slow everywhere." Perhaps it depends what software one is using For example, commandline search and tarball/zipball retrieval from the website, e.g., github.com, raw.githubusercontent.com and codeload.github.com, are not slow for me, certainly not any slower than Gitlab I do not use a browser nor do I use the git software
- kokanee 1y agoThe website is fast if you don't use the website
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoA server listening on port 443, responding to HTTP and serving HTML is generally known as as a "website" The servers at https://codeload.github.com https://codeload.github.com and https://raw.githubusercontent.com https://raw.githubusercontent.com are two examples Each redirects to https://github.com https://github.com
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoAs with any website, the HTML provides a guide to the location (URI) of resources some httpd is serving. Generally, I am not after Javascript, CSS, or other non-substantive "resources". I only want the HTML or JSON and any susbstantive resources pointed to therein I use the Github website as I would any software mirror/repository I'm not interested in images (mascots or other garbage) or executing code (gratuitous Javascript) when using the Github website, I'm interested in reading and downloading source code
- Krasnol 1y agoIt is quite snappy in my Firefox on Windows. Never had any issues with it. The page the person on the issue had loading for 10s, takes almost 2s here.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bjclark 1y agoHave you used gitlab every day in anger? I don't think you'd feel the same if you have.
- pxc 1y agoThere's things I don't like about it, and there are a looot of long-standing open issues, but I think GitLab is definitely better than GitHub in a number of ways. My org uses both (and also Azure DevOps, joy) and my team expects that the trend will be migrating from GitLab to GitHub. There are a bunch of things for me to grieve in that, much to my own surprise.
- Kelteseth 1y agoWe use a self-hosted GitLab for about 6 years now. The only thing that is really awful is if your MR gets too big. Then GitLab will simply stop showing any code changes above a certain line threshold.
- illusive4080 1y agoI use GitLab daily and feel like it’s a joy to use. What do you dislike?
- rnhmjoj 1y agoI rarely interact with projects hosted on it I'm always getting losts in unintuitive menus, for example: click on the tiny sidebar button > plan > issues just to open the bug tracker. The website also used to be bog slow compared to github, but thanks to microsoft the gap has been closing.
- cortesoft 1y agoI both use gitlab, and run our gitlab instance for our company, with as many as 700 users. I still love it! Works great, makes sense, is fast...
- sgarland 1y agoGitLab’s CI is miles better than GitHub’s. I think it’s telling that every place I’ve been at that used GH also used some 3rd party CI tool (which also sucked, but that’s par for the course), whereas places with GL seemed to manage with its native capabilities.
- estimator7292 1y ago[dead]
- monster_truck 1y agoI went several years without having to interact with Github, I came back to it this year and it was truly shocking how bad it's gotten. I had to alter basically every aspect of how I interact with it because of how fucking slow it is! I still can't shake the sense that it's about to go down or that I've done something wrong every time I click something and nothing happens for several seconds.
- siva7 1y agoI once worked with an CTO who was under the impression that Rails was a major reason why the legacy app was so slow and demanded a rewrite in Java (that's what he knew). It deflected the real reasons - of completely incompetent product managers, management and inexperienced developers. The tech stack wouldn't matter if the product was being managed for over a decade by idiots.
- bromuro 1y agoI find it fast on Chrome / Mac and I actually love the UI a lot. (The iOS app is also a wonderful app)
- vrighter 1y agoI saw the title of this post, and while clicking the comments button, I had the exact thought, word for word, of your comment's first sentence.