GitLab CI is even slower than Jenkins? It's been on my list of alternatives to evaluate, but I guess I'll just push it further down the stack...
The script that authenticates and picks up the job is a small Golang app. That's all. GitLab executes CI jobs immediately.
See the architecture and related links here: https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/#architecture
actually the biggest problems of slowness also comes from docker and caching. I think our docker setup for jenkins/gitlab-ci is not equal. for some jobs we will probably migrate away from docker, as soon as we are able to have a good story for running parallel tests.