[bdcravens]

I was considering your claim:

> we use a distributed architecture

> SourceHut is faster

I wasn't questioning that some of the web features are fast. I'm sure when Github was 10 servers their pages were fast too. I suspect if I threw Gitlab on a 9-server cluster on AWS they'd also be quick.

[ddevault]

Not geographically distributed, but distributed in the sense that different responsibilities of the overall application are distributed among different servers, which can fail independently without affecting the rest. Additionally, the mail system on which many parts of SourceHut relies is distributed in the geographical sense, among the hundreds of thousands of mail servers around the world which have standard and 50-year-battle-tested queueing and redelivery mechanisms built in.

And yes, throwing GitLab on a 9 server cluster on AWS might be fast. But, I'm ready to bet you that SourceHut will be faster than it still, and I have a ready-to-roll performance test suite to prove it. And I know that SourceHut is faster than GitLab.com and GitHub.com, and every other major host, and you don't have to go through the trouble of provisioning your own servers to take advantage of SourceHut's superior performance.