Re: git object-count differs between clones

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Feb 2, 2016, 16:52 UTC
Message-ID: <20160202165246.GA17822@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <203317792.714602.1454430077194.JavaMail.zimbra@xes-inc.com>

On Tue, Feb 02, 2016 at 10:21:17AM -0600, Andrew Martin wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

> > You may try expiring your reflog and "git gc" again.
> 
> Thanks, I found some commits that are not referenced in any branch. How can I
> remove these from the reflog? I tried running
> "git reflog expire --expire=now --expire-unreachable=now --all" followed by
> "git gc" but still the same number of objects remain.

Are the objects now loose, or still in packs? Git has a grace period for pruning objects, so that we do not delete objects for an in-progress operation. The life cycle of an unreferenced object should be something like:

  - reachable by reflogs, which are pruned after 30 days (or
    gc.reflogExpireUnreachable config). Objects will be repacked as
    normal during this time. Override with "reflog expire" as you did
    above.

  - after the reflog expires, the objects are now unreachable. During
    the next repack, they'll be ejected from the pack into loose
    objects, and their mtimes set to match the pack they came from
    (which is probably quite recent if you just repacked!).

  - after 2 weeks (or gc.pruneExpire), unreachable loose objects are
    dropped by "git prune", which is called as part of "git gc". This is
    based on the object mtime.

    You can accelerate this with "git gc --prune=now" (or
    "--prune=5.minutes.ago").

-Peff