How did the performance of GitHub become so slow in the first place? It didn't used to be this bad years ago.

Some hard numbers [1] as to why GitHub is struggling with stability issues, directly from GitHub's COO:

Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)

GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.

So we're pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub’s core features.

1: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878

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jiggawatts 2 hours ago | parent [-]

All of which can be handled with horizontal scaling of identical components.

None of which explains poor latency when opening UI elements, which is more likely be explained by overuse of SPA or spaghetti code in microservices.

Update: yup, that’s exactly it, just as I guessed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47912867

	▲	dangus 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This whole thread is so embarrassing for GitHub. The idea that you would change your product design in this way as a quick fix to solve a performance problem is insane. This would be like if the battery life on a MacBook Pro was too short so Apple fixed it by removing the screen. Job’s done, boss!

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Strom 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI. GitHub usage has exploded recently due to the ease at which code can be generated.

	▲	adsteel_ 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Not just due to code generation, but to AI code scraping and inspection.

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userbinator 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

From what I remember, it got much worse the moment they started requiring JS for displaying what would otherwise be mostly static (and thus easily cached) content.