gitk normal use on linux repo and severe memory pressure

An anecdotical report: Right today, I fired up gitk on a linux-2.6.39 checkout to review some new patches. While discussing the patches with other developers on irc, my machine (arguably, RAM-constrained at 1GB) started to hit swap heavily.

Took a couple of minutes to kill it and get the machine back to a usable state. This is on F-14, git v1.7.4.4 .

Linus' early instinct that people care about the recent patches (so gitk and git log better show them immediately) was spot on. Now the problem is that gitk continues to walk history regardless of user interest. It gobbled up a ton of memory while I never went deeper than 20 commits.

I am tempted to set a global config option limiting gitk to a couple thousand commits, but it's not really the right solution. If I am trawling older history, I'll hit the limit and have to close gitk and reopen overriding the parameter.

Are there efforts afoot to teach gitk to read in _some_ history and pause, continuing if the user scrolls down? Not sure if searches are done in-memory in gitk -- which probably complicates things.

cheers,

m