Re: git gc --auto yelling at users where a repo legitimately has >6700 loose objects

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Jan 12, 2018, 13:46 UTC
Message-ID: <20180112134609.GB7880@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <87inc89j38.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com>

On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 10:33:15PM +0100, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>  4. At the end of all this, we check *again* if we have >6700 objects,
>     if we do we print "run 'git prune'" to .git/gc.log, and will just
>     emit that error for the next day before trying again, at which point
>     we unlink the gc.log and retry, see gc.logExpiry.
> 
> Right now I've just worked around this by setting gc.pruneExpire to a
> lower value (4.days.ago). But there's a larger issue to be addressed
> here, and I'm not sure how.

IMHO the right solution is to stop exploding loose objects, and instead write them all into a "cruft" pack. That's more efficient, to boot (since it doesn't waste inodes, and may even retain deltas between cruft objects).

But there are some tricks around timestamps. I wrote up some thoughts in:

  https://public-inbox.org/git/20170610080626.sjujpmgkli4muh7h@sigill.intra.peff.net/

and downthread from there.

-Peff