Sorry to say it like this but you’ve been working on your performance problems for years now and you’re still at the same place. I think your problems run much deeper than that.
Their gitlab website is much faster than a year ago. A year ago I moved all my repos from GitHub to gitlab because I had to cut some personal costs. I remember it took a while to load pages when navigating around the site. A week or so ago I logged in for the first time in a Long Long time to setup a project to share with someone to test some ideas. I was surprised that I wasn’t waiting for pages to load. It was much faster than it used to be. Still room for improvement but I did notice it was much faster.
So while they still have improvements to make it would be a lie to say they haven’t improved at all.
Even with the influx of users due to this I was able to not only setup a repo, but push all code up, and deploy via GitLab CI all within minutes... Speed is very good. I don't notice a difference between it and GitHub.
> Also, I don't think GitLab has had a long downtime recently.
That mostly depends on whether you're using CI/CD I'd think, that's had some day-long outages/problems lately. Of course, GitHub doesn't even have it's own CI/CD, and GitLab's is amazingly flexible, so it's still the better product. But it'd be nice if it were more stable.
(Note: all this is on GitLab.com. If you self-host, it's presumably much better.)
I don't encounter all of them myself - it depends on what I'm working on and perhaps also the timezone. That said, April 26th was the most recent occurrence for me where I was very happy I wasn't in the middle of a production deployment that I would have had to roll back. See the status updates on that day on https://twitter.com/GitLabStatus
(I am using the free tier though, so this is more informative than that I'm complaining.)
I first tried migrating to GitLab when the public cloud first came out and abandoned it due to performance.
However, I re-valuated and did migrate about 2 years ago and it has been fine during that time. There have been a few hiccups, but not for more than an hour or so. I've had a team of 4-7 devs working in it all day for the last two years and we have not had performance problems. We run our own CI runners as well, and while the cloud runners do often have delays, I've never had issues with delays to my own runners unless they were all busy.
So while they still have improvements to make it would be a lie to say they haven’t improved at all.