GitLab 8.5 Enterprise edition is the fastest release of GitLab so far. Its performance has increased a lot, offering users what they need in an easier and quicker way with Todos, a chronological list of to-dos. Todos helps users to start on their work faster and creates automatic to-dos that can be set to ‘done’ whenever a certain task is finished.

“At GitLab, making sure everything runs smoothly with thousands of projects has always been a priority. But with GitLab 8.5, we’ve raised the bar for ourselves. Average mean performance is up at least 1.4 times, up to 1.6 times for 99th percentile response times. For slower pages, the response time has been improved way beyond this,” Job van der Voort, GitLab vice president of product posted on an article about GitLab’s fastest release on February 22, 2016.

GitLab also introduced the alpha of GitLab Geo that allows users to have a “remote replicate” of their Geo instance which makes it easier and quicker for users who work in various teams to easily replicate their GitLab instance as well as read data faster, even when teams are located in long distances from one another.  

Anyone who runs a huge server will be particularly glad about GitLab’s many performance improvements such as:

• Broadcast messages are cached, reducing the impact they have on page loading times !2633
• Performance of Repository#empty? and Repository#has_visible_content? has been improved and their output is cached, reducing project specific page (issues, project dashboard, etc) loading times by about 3 to 3.5 times. This was changed in gitlab_git!62 followed by !2752
• Caches for branch commit ahead/behind statistics are only flushed when needed. For example, when pushing to a non default branch only the statistics for said branch are flushed, whereas previously the statistics for all branches would be flushed. This was changed in !2769
• Performance of retrieving the issues that should be closed by a merge request has been improved in !2625
• Performance of Atom feeds has been greatly improved in !2613, leading to a reduction of up to roughly 10 seconds per page load (depending on the amount of events involved)
•  !2859 changes the way the Git core.autocrlf option is set. Previously this would be written (regardless of whether it was already set) on every request. As of now, this is only set by the web editor/API before creating/updating files (as this is the only case where it’s actually needed).
• ‘Raw’ file contents from Git repositories are served by gitlab-workhorse now, which prevents timeouts.
• GitLab no longer loads large Git blobs (e.g. binary files) into memory when browsing a Git repository. This prevents timeouts and memory leaks.

Source : GitLab 

Among the release contributors was Artem Sidorenko supporting the relative URLs in Omnibus installations and becoming GitLab’s MVP for February. With the aim to make GitLab the best software for managing various projects, the company offers its users the opportunity to vote, share their opinions on what works or doesn’t for them as well as participate in live demo and Q&A sessions in order to get more informed about GitLab updates.

It is expected that in the coming updates, GitLab will continue to make further improvements and introduce new changes.

Image Source: techcrunch.com