I tried a self-hosted GitLab on a 64 core beast of a machine with Optane drives. Completely empty of content, there were multi-second delays everywhere. Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade, I switched to Forgejo, Crow CI and YouTrack and couldn’t be happier.
> Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade
It's Ruby, which is pretty horrific but still I think there was probably something not quite right in your setup because it isn't normally that slow.