[sytse]

Thanks for the concrete examples.

GitLab is faster in on some pages. The commit page probably is slower, but not by so much:

wget https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/commits/master master.1 [ <=> ] 66.40K 382KB/s in 0.2s

wget https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/commits/master master.2 100%[=====================>] 183.50K 662KB/s in 0.3s

Again, your milage may vary (cache) and I do agree that the commits page of GitHub feels faster most of the time.

GitLab doesn't have preview support for as many features as GitHub, but it has many other features GitHub doesn't have such as protected branches and git-annex support (version large binaries with git).

There are less integrations than GitHub but I would not say there is a lack of them https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master/app/mode...

We think the issue tracker is good, working with labels can be improved but getting a milestone overview across projects is pretty sweet.

Availability of GitLab.com is over 99.9% at the moment http://status.gitlab.com/

Over 700 people have contributed to GitLab http://contributors.gitlab.com/

We understand if people place open source projects on GitHub, they have way more registered users. But some people choose GitLab and their numbers are growing.

[the_mitsuhiko]

> GitLab is faster in on some pages. The commit page probably is slower, but not by so much:

For the initial HTTP request maybe and if you're in the US. Gitlab is painfully slow when loaded from a European network connection and you factor in the time it takes to fetch all resources. Cached or uncached.

> GitLab doesn't have preview support for as many features as GitHub, but it has many other features GitHub doesn't have such as protected branches and git-annex support (version large binaries with git).

Neither of which are important for Open Source projects.

> We understand if people place open source projects on GitHub, they have way more registered users. But some people choose GitLab and their numbers are growing.

I think Gitlab is a reasonable website to use for commercial hosting; I just don't see it for Open Source software.

[sytse]

Right now GitLab is hosted in Germany (AWS Frankfurt) and I was testing from the US (Mountain View). But I sometimes see the same delay you mention. We'll move it to the US east coast over the next couple of months.

I think protected branches are really nice for open source projects too, although I agree that most contributions will come from forks. Right now no open source projects use Git Annex but that might change now that it becomes easier to use, probably it is really nice if you have an open source game with huge digital assets.

[realityking]

Out of curiosity, why Frankfurt?

Speaking as a European, it would be nice if you could keep it performant over here too ;)

[sytse]

Because Frankfurt was close to Delft and we wanted to reduce latency to move the data, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171533

We think the east coast of the US is the best compromise considering our user base. Can't solve speed of light :/