Re: Performance issue of 'git branch'

> I don't know why .git/refs/heads/stern does not exist and why it takes
> so long with it. That branch is functional ('git checkout stern' succeeds),
> as well as all the others. But strangely .git/refs/heads/ contains only
> 
> [mafra@Pilar:linux-2.6]$ ls .git/refs/heads/
> dev-private  master  sparse
> 
> which, apart from "master", are the last branches that I created.
> 
> I occasionally run 'git gc --aggressive --prune" to optimize the repo,
> but other than that I don't do anything fancy, just 'pull' almost
> every day and 'bisect' (which is becoming a rare event now :-)
> 
> So I would like to ask what should I do to recover the missing files
> in .git/refs/heads/ (which apparently is the cause for my issue) and
> how I can avoid losing them in the first place.