Re: Git status takes too long- How to improve the performance of git

From: Fredrik Gustafsson <iveqy@iveqy.com>
Date: Nov 15, 2016, 10:24 UTC
Message-ID: <20161115102400.GC28860@paksenarrion.iveqy.com>
In-Reply-To: <1479202392275-7657456.post@n2.nabble.com>

Hi,

On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 02:33:12AM -0700, ravalika wrote:

> We are using git-1.8.2 version for version control.

That's a three (almost four) year old version of git. Your first test should be to see if an upgrade to a recent version will improve things.

> It is an centralized server and git status takes too long

A centralized server? How? git is designed to be runned locally. If you're running git on a network file system, the performance will suffer. Could you elaborate on how your environment is setup?

Show 10 quoted lines

> 
> How to improve the performance of git status
> 
> Git repo details:
> 
> Size of the .git folder is 8.9MB
> Number of commits approx 53838  (git rev-list HEAD --count)
> Number of branches -  330  
> Number of files - 63883
> Working tree clone size is 4.3GB

.git folder of 8.9 MEGABYTE and working tree of 4.3 GIGABYTE? Is this a typo?

Show 10 quoted lines

> 
> time git status shows
> real	0m23.673s
> user	0m9.432s
> sys	0m3.793s
> 
> then after 5 mins
> real    0m4.864s
> user    0m1.417s
> sys     0m4.710s

A slow disc and empty caches are slow. Two ways of improving this is to have faster discs or make sure your cache is up to date. When I'd a really slow disc, I'd my shell to run a git status in the background to load the cache everytime I started working on a project. This is however an ugly hack that wasn't approved to be a part of git.

Show 12 quoted lines

> 
> And I have experimented the following ways 
> -          -  Setting core.ignorestat to true
> -          -  Git gc &git clean
> -          -  Shallow clone – Reducing number of commits
> -          -  Clone only one branch 
>       - Git repacking - git repack -ad && git prune
> -     - Cold/warm cache 
> 
> Could you please let me know, what are the ways to improve the git
> performance ?
> I have gone through the mailing lists.

You could always check the --assume-unchanged bit, see the manual page for git update-index. However this is quite extreme and demanding for the user.

-- 
Fredrik Gustafsson

phone: +46 733-608274
e-mail: iveqy@iveqy.com
website: http://www.iveqy.com