This is a user experience story related to troubleshooting. One day a new user tries Gitlab for the first time. Maybe he’s me.
During the startup of Gitlab, for up to 5 minutes, Gitlab shows the dreaded 502 error page, instead of a “please wait, we’re getting ready around here page”. Note that Jenkins is much nicer than Gitlab. Jenkins has a “startup” root document that will load even when the whole Jenkins service is not up yet. Maybe Gitlab should grow just such a feature.
Secondly, after the first push of the master branch for some large project (try Linus Torvald’s cool Linux repository for instance), the project page for https://gitlab.ramsoft.biz/newuserid/linux also responds with a 502 error, or other error pages, while Gitlab is busily scanning the newly pushed repository. It seems to me “hang on, we’re still processing this repository” would be a useful page to have.
If either of these haven’t been suggested before I’d be happy to log these suggestions. It seems to me that Gitlab is awesome but that the new user experiences far too many 502 pages and that these should come in Flavors. JustPushedHoldOnAMinute is one, and StillStartingEverythingUpHoldOnAMinute is another.
For more User experience review fun, try loading the Linux repository homepage a few times, and watch GitLab crawl to its knees to read the repo information. Linux 4.x has 589,485 commits, and repo size is 1.7 gb. The readme.md is quite long as well. Praise Redis and long live the cache hit. When the cache misses on this repo, it’s a big miss.
Cheers everybody.
Warren