Self hosted gitlab is also slow unfortunately. I introduced gitlab to my company as a replacement for gitosis. It's been ok but we're looking to move to gogs.io which is a lot less clunky and slow. If gitlab really want traction, they need to fix their software to be on par with the quality of other open source offerings.
Gogs is super quick, well designed and powerful. If it has all the features you require, I highly recommend it. Rolling updates were quite simple, swap nginx from one Docker container to another and you're good to go.
That's good to hear. I've been meaning to look at Gogs again, after having first played with it in it's early days (before pull requests were available). Sounds like it's usable now. :)
On what system (resources) are you running gitlab? In my experience it is not slow. I also run a gogs instance; great for the modest resource requirements but by far no match in features and look. Both make sense imho and do not overlap much.
