Hi, sorry you haven't noticed any improvements. We've been chipping away at performance for the last 6 months and have made some pretty noticeable improvements in various areas of the application.
For example, the average response time of an issue page has come down from 2.5s to 750ms over the last 6 months.
We still have a lot to do, but we're getting there.
We've been working quite a bit of our NFS storage topology and have recently introduced some remediation to prevent outages based on NFS availability. Previously an NFS failure would have pretty wide-reaching implications, now it's a lot more isolated.
We're also working on an entirely new storage architecture for scaling and are slowly rolling this out. You can see more here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly
We've been spending a lot of effort making GitLab.com more performant over the course of this year. We still have some ways to go, but every release includes performance enhancements based on performance data from GitLab.com.
We no longer see GitLab.com as a mechanism to stress test GitLab and we're certainly pushing hard to improve performance and availability.
Thank you for the kind words, we've been working hard on improving the UI (have you tried the latest update in https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences#new-navigation) and have tried to make our free offering as valuable as possible as well as treating our existing free customers respectfully.
If you're interested in what you can build with Bubble, check it out - I'd love to get feedback.
And if you're so inclined, I'm on Product Hunt today too.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/troupe