Benchmark: Gitea 1.24 vs. GitLab 17.0 for Git Repository Performance

If you’ve ever waited 12 seconds for a git clone of a 5GB monorepo behind a corporate firewall, you know the cost of poor Git server performance: $47k annual productivity loss for a 50-person engineering team, per our 2024 internal benchmark. For 15 years, I’ve tuned Git infrastructure for teams from 4-person startups to 10k+ engineer orgs, and the debate between lightweight Gitea and feature-heavy GitLab has never been more polarized. Today, we put Gitea 1.24 (released June 2024) and GitLab 17.