Their performance graph shows response timings up to 25 seconds [1]. GitHub's mean web response time goes up to 200 milliseconds. The difference is two orders of magnitude. Is GitLab really that much slower?! [1] https://about.gitlab.com/images/8_5/issue_timings.png [2] https://status.github.com/
That said, we're fully aware of the shortcoming of GitLab.com. It has been slow and unresponsive. We're working hard on improving it [0] and this release has been a step in that.