Bottlenecks in git merge

Hello, 

In connection with Ian Molton's question about merge have I played a little with 'git merge' on the kernel sources. What I find is that a merge can take quite some time, but I'm not sure where that time exactly goes to. Here are the times I got:

Recursive (default): 4m22.282s Resolve (-s resolve): 3m23.548s

What is taking so long?

Regards,

Peter

==============================>8================== #!/bin/sh # Run from linux-2.6

change_readme() {
	sed -i "s/are much better/are better/" README
}

git checkout -f master git branch -d test git checkout -b test v2.6.12 change_readme git commit -a -m "Work, work, work" time git merge $STRATEGY "Merging happily." HEAD v2.6.15