Re: [RFC/PATCH] Documentation/technical/api-fswatch.txt: start with outline

> git operations are slow on repositories with lots of files, and lots
> of tiny filesystem calls like lstat(), getdents(), open() are
> reposible for this.  On the linux-2.6 repository, for instance, the
> numbers for "git status" look like this:
> 
>   top syscalls sorted     top syscalls sorted
>   by acc. time            by number
>   ----------------------------------------------
>   0.401906 40950 lstat    0.401906 40950 lstat
>   0.190484 5343 getdents  0.150055 5374 open
>   0.150055 5374 open      0.190484 5343 getdents
>   0.074843 2806 close     0.074843 2806 close
>   0.003216 157 read       0.003216 157 read
> 
> To solve this problem, we propose to build a daemon which will watch
> the filesystem using inotify and report batched up events over a UNIX
> socket.  Since inotify is Linux-only, we have to leave open the
> possibility of writing similar daemons for other platforms.
> Everything will continue to work as before if there is no helper
> present.