Ask HN: Did GitHub UI become unbearably slow?

14•zaphodias•7mo ago

I remember being able to review even large PRs (70-100 files changed) from the web UI fairly easily, but now every time I click a button, the page becomes unresponsive for many seconds.

For what it's worth (excluding client-side issues), I have a high-speed internet connection and a last-gen CPU.

Things that are very slow (from 5 to 60 seconds depending on the number of items) for me:

- Clicking on "Pull requests" tab for any repo

- Opening a PR with many comments (50+)

- Opening "Files changed" tab from inside any PR

- Marking a file as "viewed" from the "Files changed" tab

Tips I found to mitigate this:

- Opening the link in a new tab often usually only takes half the time than navigating in your current page.

- Review PRs from the visual studio code web ui (github.dev), easily accessible by pressing "." while viewing a PR

Comments

jsheard•7mo ago

Possibly related to them just adding stricter rate limits, because AI scrapers won't stop pissing in the pool?

https://github.blog/changelog/2025-05-08-updated-rate-limits...

zaphodias•7mo ago

Just to be clear, I am authenticated. Maybe they are struggling with the AI scrapers though, you're right.

genezeta•7mo ago

Earlier this morning they "temporarily rate banned" me after clicking a total of 3 files in some repository.

May be related, or maybe not.

bob1029•7mo ago

GitHub used to be server-side rendered. This is the consequence of drinking the client side framework koolaid.

One could argue about how react makes it easier for big orgs to work together or whatever. But, when the whole point of the product is to be a robust productivity tool for developers and they can't do basic tasks without getting frustrated, it doesn't matter. The entire product could become irrelevant if someone exploits this weakness. Speed is a killer feature in a market where few understand how to actually provide it (or have the courage to preserve it).

e-topy•7mo ago

This is why I like SourceHut. It's fast, lean, js-free, shows only what's important on screen.

The only downside is that I now need to juggle between two git servers that don't make mirroring easy. But if (when) Microsoft decides to do something stupid, I at least have an escape hatch.

efortis•7mo ago

I like IntelliJ’s Github plugin for reviewing PRs. It’s nice for adding bookmarks and code folding.

frou_dh•7mo ago

Yes, when navigating a repo's files on an older computer, I noticed that it took an incredible length of time to rehydrate pages or whatever it's doing.

bigbassroller•7mo ago

Did you add node_modules to your repo by chance?

pbkompasz•7mo ago

A lot of big websites, e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, GitHub, have become really bad and sometimes unusable in the past year or two. I think it's mainly due to using unnecessarily complex frontend frameworks and the low quality of code generated by LLMs. It's a vibe.

dapperdrake•7mo ago

At first it was only too slow on mobile.

Future Fed Leaders Push Rate Cuts

Designing Team Traditions That Fit Your Team

Pulumi for All Your IaC – Including Terraform and HCL

How to Not Be Replaced by AI

FPGAs Need a New Future

Where's Putin? How the Kremlin Hides Him with Three Nearly Identical Offices

AI Is Creating More Work, Countering the Doomers for Now

Show HN: CodexPad – a Notion-style workspace with Vim-native editing

Deep Generative Models – Stanford CS236 Lecture Notes

Fraud Intelligence for Africa

PostgreSQL extension for BM25 relevance-ranked full-text search

Monett: Social Media Made for Humans

Building Blocks for Agents in C++

Thoughts on paying down tech debt

The Edge-First Manifesto

If You've Never Broken It, You Don't Know It

NetBSD/Amiga

The Day Our Own Queries DoS'ed Us: Inside Zalando Search

Evaluating Large Language Models in Scientific Discovery

Amazon will allow ePub and PDF downloads for DRM-free eBooks

The Fight Inside Amnesty International over Its Hamas Report

New York's Phone Ban Saved High School

Show HN: Agents.db – an AGENTS.md alternative for LLM agent context

Getting Ethereum Ready for GigaGas

Candleloriam: The Cursed Tree

Life, Death and Mowing

How to bypass YouTube ad-blocking restrictions?

This is the only reason most startups die slowly

Go ahead, self-host Postgres

Show HN: I built a self-hosted link shortener with rate limiting