Yeah Gitlab is a pig, but that’s what I meant with you can throw hardware at the problem. I’ve been meaning to check out Codeberg for personal project hosting since it seems to address the shortcomings of gitea

You can also just use Gitlab Cloud but setup as many self hosted runners as you like.

GitLab scales much better horizontally than it does vertically.

4x 4c/16gb instances will perform much better than one 16 core 64GB instance.