yeah that is true. i did manage a gitlab instance for ~100 developers (between 2019 and 2022) and yeah performance was shit. not gonna lie, i blame ruby for that.

if you accept the performance hit, it's great quality software though.

however, a fairly large company with 100-120 users (developers, devops engineers, QAs etc) and ~600 gitlab runners ran happily on a 8 core / 64gb virtual machine (hosted on a local vmware cluster).

so it is (was?) also fairly cheap.