We were running an outdated version of GForge on our servers (I think it was 4.5.12) and we felt it was being a little hard to maintain.
So, we looked for good alternatives. Unfortunately, all of them cost money. Of course, our first option was the latest version of GForge, the 5.x version (called "Advanced Server") which, unlinke GForge 4.5, is not open source. However, it has a free 15-user license (which is called the "Express Edition"), which luckily suited our needs since we're a small group of 7 developers, so we decided to go that way. We downloaded it from GForge Group's page, http://gforgegroup.com (the company that maintains GForge).
Since GForge 5 uses PHP5 technology and GForge 4 runs under PHP4, we decided to install it on a separate server. All that was available for us was a not-so-great Pentium IV machine with 1 GB of RAM, so we hoped that was enough. On the GForge page it says it installs on Ubuntu, so we grabbed a copy of it and installed it on the server.
Installing GForge was a breeze — anyone who installed GForge 4 knows how hard that task is, but for GForge 5 the install consists on running just 3 scrips and voilá! It automatically downloads and installs all the required packages (we had to compile eaccelerator by hand though). So, after a few minutes, we had it up and running:
Migrating the data from our old server wasn't very hard, luckily GForge 5 provides a migration script which imports the data from a 4.5 install. Everything worked as expected, even the SVN and tracker integration worked out of the box (no need to do extra setup).
We've been using GForge 5 for a couple of weeks now and the experience has been positive. We didn't have any performance problems and the server seems to be performing well. The support provided by GForge Group was good, we bumped into a migration issue but they were able to help us quick.
