Why is BitBucket slow?

Emre July 2, 2018

Hello,

I love BitBucket and I'm using it for many repos but page opening or code view are unfortunately loading slowly.

I don't think it's from my internet speed or the cache.
 
How are your experiences?
Do you see any slowness?

Thank you

32 answers

18 votes
Flavio Sadeghi February 11, 2021

It is still slow! The current slowness is frustrating - this breaks any sense of efficient work flow! Atlassian, whats our target with a saas build environment?

Current log entry: 

> ...
> Cache "docker": Downloaded 250.9 MiB in 179 seconds
> ...

250 MB in 3 Minutes? Do I live in the 21th century? For a !!CACHED!! image? Maybe we have to change the build environment...

8 votes
Mohamed HAIDARA May 13, 2019

Also confirm that Bitbucket is slower than other services like gitlab or github

Janek Bogucki September 24, 2019

Bitbucket is far slow than GitHub but often I used to find GitHub over cached pages requiring a reload to get the latest data. However Bitbucket speed must be improved. The current slowness is frustrating and breaks any sense of efficient work flow.

Like # people like this
Reece Alexander June 22, 2021
  • Several bitbucket pages require a refresh to see updated data. Pull-requests, merge check completions etc.
  • Several aspects of bitbucket are clunky, and really do impact efficiency.
  • Suddenly not logged in? Refresh, get redirected through 500 endpoints then suddenly you're logged in again when all you did was refresh the page.
  • Bad code coverage implementation.
  • Pipelines randomly fail, then when you click "Re-run" they pass successfully. Immediately causing deployment delays and pointlessly raising concern that the fail was due to an issue in the repository.
  • Pipelines documentation misleading, you do not have full control over docker images being used, or the settings that those images expose despite the docs telling you that you do. For example; good luck setting the charset/collation of a mysql image. (Source: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67135896/passing-extra-commands-to-a-docker-image-from-bitbucket-piplines-yml )
  • Reviewing a PR and you receive a "Diff empty" message? Log in and out then you can see the diff? That's so dangerous it's not even funny, how many people have passed this off as being truthful only to find they've merged code they were never given an opportunity to see?

Been forced to use bitbucket for two years now, in comparison to using github for the better part of a decade - bitbucket has a LONG way to go to get anywhere close.

 

Update 01/07/2021:

Over the past week or more, ALL merges take several minutes to complete, once upon a time longer than 10 seconds was weird. Usually negligible and seems dismal but those minutes were important to me and the client when on emergency work at 3am for international clients. I thought it was an intermittent issue but there has been no change on any day no matter the hour :\

Trust atlassian to call it a feature though:  https://bitbucket.status.atlassian.com/incidents/8nbqbyxl2t03

 

Update 07/07/2021:

Merges still incredibly slow, there has been no noticeable improvement over the past 7 days. I believe it may actually be slower than the last time I updated this post.

Will swap a 4/10 for an explanation or at least an informed response of whether or not this will be the new normal of "how long a merge will take".

 

Update 21/07/2021:

Now moving several hundred repositories to GitHub.

 

Update 02/08/2021:

Weeping in agony, showing symptoms of RSI.

 

Bitbucket: 3/10

Gitlab: 9/10

Github: 10/10

Like # people like this
Drew Heasman July 12, 2021

They've posted this blog entry: https://bitbucket.org/blog/encountering-some-turbulence-on-bitbuckets-journey-to-a-new-platform

It acknowledges merges are slower than they used to be, but their solution appears to be updating the UI to make it clear what is happening rather than making it faster...

Like # people like this
Jon Link July 12, 2021

That's a horrible solution. Time to look at github.

Like # people like this
Reece Alexander July 12, 2021

Thanks!

Can't help but laugh....

 

Everyone: How do I fix diffs?

Atlassian: Make smaller changes

 

...

Like # people like this
Drew Heasman July 15, 2021

One line commits in tiny repos are still taking several minutes for me

Like # people like this
Andrew MacKenzie July 21, 2021

We're also now looking to move our code away from BitBucket and into GitHub.

The bells and whistles that go along with the whole Atlassian ecosystem just aren't worth the 5+ minutes every commit/merge/push seems to take. 

For our needs, it only costs us 1$ more per user (~30 devs/users) to switch to GitHub. It's a no-brainer, really.

@Reece Alexander good luck on the migration, sir!

Like # people like this
CL July 22, 2021

I get the plan: the performance of bitbucket will go up, if enough users leave ;)

Seriously, showing in the UI that a merge takes longer and is processed in the background is NO solution. 

It is annoying, you get error messages on reload, and it breaks the workflow...

We had cases where an approval was done during a long "sync merge" which invalidated then the approval...

Please fix it.

BTW: with every "improvement" on Confluence, it also gets worse ... you might wanna rethink your improvement strategy...

Like Drew Heasman likes this
Reece Alexander August 23, 2021

In fairness to bitbucket, merges now take less than 30 seconds and have been consistent in doing so for several days

Jon Link August 23, 2021

In fairness to the paying customers, merges consistently took minutes for several months. No one has been "unfair" to BitBucket.

Like # people like this
Reece Alexander August 23, 2021

I meant in fairness to the remediation they have made, merges no longer take several minutes. I'm not one to hold a grudge when an effort has been clearly made to improve the issue, I am a developer after all with plenty of perspectives - it's 30 seconds instead of 10minutes, that's good news no matter how you look at it.

Happy merging :)

Jon Link August 23, 2021

fair enough :)

From my perspective leaving customers high and dry for months after rolling out a barely half-baked product update shows, to me, to what regard they hold their customers. The server update never even should have been released since it's a painfully obvious issue. Even then they should have rolled everything back until they could fix it. Instead they stayed the course (likely because of cost) and made their customers pay for their mistake.

So yeah, I'm happy the product we are paying for is once again useable, but do I trust them enough to believe it'll stay that way?

Like # people like this
2 votes
Mohammad Tomaraei July 15, 2021

It's terrible now! Merges and syncs take forever and the interface fails to properly reload the page.

2 votes
Deleted user July 13, 2021

I've used Atlassian products for years now (BitBucket, Jira, Confluence) and this has always been an issue. It has gotten increasingly bad over the last years, every time they introduce a new UI it gets slower and more sluggish, to the point where it now takes 5-10 seconds to load a single issue. It's a terrible practice for a toolbox designed to optimize workflow. 

I wouldn't hold my breath.

2 votes
fawzanm July 2, 2021

I've successfully managed to move my client to github. This is ridiculous for a paid service. 

2 votes
fawzanm July 14, 2020

Bitbucket is the worst. I am trying to convince my client to move away from this paid price of bull crap. Very annoying, trying for months now and it takes hours to push an emergency update. 

1 vote
hasan_dertli January 25, 2023

Bitbucket is still very slow. It consumes all my energy. 

1 vote
clebrese July 19, 2021

Performance has degraded terribly over the past 6 months and a fancy banner saying come back later isn't going to fix it.

Slow on all my repos and it doesn't matter the size of the PR. I get that merges can happen in the background, but that really interrupts your workflow when you're waiting on the merge to complete before going onto another task. E.g. we might really need that approved PR merged into develop before starting the next feature branch.

PR diff has been broken for ages. Okay, as a reviewer we all want smaller PRs, but Bitbucket should be able to handle PRs of any size. Recently we made wholesale changes to our apps package which touched 90% of our files. We ended up merging locally, reviewing the changes and then approving though bit bucket. We've lost confidence in the PR system with empty Diffs and files not appearing.

Seems GitHub or a local server is looking like a better solution.

1 vote
Peter Bosák July 2, 2021

Bitbucket is incredibly slow, by far the slowest git alternative there is. Pages take seconds to refresh and merge requests may take up to minutes (if they don't fail altogether).

All Atlassian frontends suffer from this. The only and best solution is to avoid it completely

1 vote
Mark June 3, 2020

WOW - BitBucket Team ... so SLOOOOOWWWWWW! I have a very fast internet connection. Other sites very fast,. But BitBucket.org is taking so long that I keep giving up. What the heck is going on? We have a significant corporate account with you. We may need to start thinking about other options if this continues.

Mark June 3, 2020

I tried to do a Merge. This time I waited. After waiting many minutes it eventually came back with "Failed to fetch" .... what on earth is the problem?

1 vote
ggedde September 29, 2019

As of recently it has been better. 1-2 second page loads instead of 3-5 seconds, like it use to be.  Hopefully is stays that way or improves :)

1 vote
deadRabbit September 14, 2019

This is one of the slowest websites on the web

ganesh_vellanki September 14, 2019

I am doing a push, its taking me minutes... for a small css change in a new branch.

Like Gurgen Sargsyan likes this
Janek Bogucki September 24, 2019

Bitbucket has been even slower than normal recently. Over the last couple of months it's noticeably slower. Too slow be acceptable.

Like Gurgen Sargsyan likes this
deadRabbit September 28, 2019

Disabling the Ad-block improved the website speed greatly.

Like Bruno Degomme likes this
ggedde September 29, 2019

What do you mean the Ad-Block? if you mean a browser or third-party Ad Blocker, well I am not using one. If you are referring to some sort of setting in Bitbucket then could you clarify.  Thanks

However, the site has been much better for me recently so it isn't much of an issue now

1 vote
orioljd June 11, 2019

Hi, I had bitbucket in spanish, I changed it to English and now it's faster.

1 vote
Ruari Mactaggart May 3, 2019

Likewise, I find it slow, and often down. I've also learned to live with it, but wouldn't necessarily recommend it for this reason.

1 vote
ggedde April 17, 2019

It has always been slower for me as well.  I have just learned to accept it.  I was hoping with the new UI they rolled out last year that it would have been better, but unfortunately, not so much.

0 votes
Rafik Mechria
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February 22, 2024

Ofcourse Bitbucket is slow because is built using the python django framework, and it is super slow compared to Java

0 votes
rootgirlfriend January 4, 2023

this is how I fix the slow pull problem from bitbucket on centos server:

first step: 

vi /etc/hosts and add:

# fix git pull bitbucket project failed

18.205.93.0 bitbucket.org

151.101.1.194 bitbucket.global.ssl.fastly.net

* ip address are from  [ https://www.ipaddress.com/site/bitbucket.org ] and  [ https://www.ipaddress.com/site/bitbucket.global.ssl.fastly.net ]

Second step: 

service nscd restart

 

now pull is fast!

I am currently in US so push fast on my laptop, but pull is slow in my centos server that is not in US. If your situation is similar to mine, you might find this solution helpful too.

Hope this helps someone

0 votes
Howard Lovatt November 9, 2022

I’m finding Bitbucket super slow compared to GitHub, e.g. overnight for a multi megabyte file!  Has anyone ever found a solution? Guessing not, looking at this thread!

0 votes
Allberto Pardo Saleme July 9, 2022

Crappy slow. I'm forced to use Bitbucket by my company. Otherwise I would have switched to Github long ago.

 

It takes forever to load pages, to show pipelines, to merge. I have 300mb/s fiber. I'm definitively not the problem.

 

Athlassian, do something! This is becoming a curse!

0 votes
Michał Skrzyński May 31, 2022

This is where the problem of virtualization seems to me.
Resources are shared and simply missing.
I have bitbucket and jira on my own server: ssd and 16gb ram and it's very fast.
Unfortunately, people are starting to move away from increasingly slower products

0 votes
Antonio Masotti August 28, 2021

That's ridiculous... 3 min to fetch the remote branch and I'm still waiting since 6-7 min to get my push (2 tiny commits) completed. Not to mention occasional bugs in Bamboo when it comes to deployment....

Sorry but if this doesn't change reasonably soon I'll convince my company to switch to some other alternative...

0 votes
hadassah.epstein July 21, 2021

It literally took 8 minutes on the clock to merge a tiny 2 file pr. This is really not conducive to an efficient workflow. I understand that it's more efficient for Bitbucket to have things in a queue and have workers take care of things one at a time, but this system of queuing things up for eventual processing really only makes sense for non-time-sensitive tasks. Merging PRs can many times be very time sensitive and should not be relegated to a background task that will happen eventually. Can something please be done to fix this?

0 votes
Jon Link July 15, 2021

I've switched to merging local and pushing it up. Even though that's annoying and slow it is still far far faster.

0 votes
Mont-Royal July 13, 2021

I reused bitbucket  yesterday and this morning, and I'm surprised of the slowness for each action. And when it's not slow, I get error message like "Something went wrong Wait a few moments, then try again." This is not professional...

0 votes
Etienne Friedli July 12, 2021

We have managed to hold on for 2 consecutive years of slowness, but this cannot continue, we'll have to move to github or any serious repo provider... That's not cool! Why does Atlassian not react? Anybody here?

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