Re: Initial git clone behaviour

> On Wed, Jan 6, 2016 at 2:26 PM, Eric Curtin <ericcurtin17@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Often I do a standard git clone:
>>
>> git clone (name of repo)
>>
>> Followed by a depth=1 clone in parallel, so I can get building and
>> working with the code asap:
>>
>> git clone --depth=1 (name of repo)
>>
>> Could we change the default behavior of git so that we initially get
>> all the current files quickly so that we can start working them and
>> then getting the rest of the data? At least a user could get to work
>> quicker this way. Any disadvantages of this approach?
>
> It would put more burden on a shared and limited resource (i.e.
> the server side).
>
> For example, I just tried a depth=1 clone of Linus's repository from
>
>   git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
>
> which transferred ~150MB pack data to check out 52k files in 90 seconds.
>
> On the other hand, a full clone transferred ~980MB pack data and it took
> 170 seconds to complete. You can already see that a full clone is highly
> optimized--it does not take even twice the time of getting the most recent
> checkout to grab 10 years worth of development (562k of commits).
>
> This efficiency comes from some tradeoffs, and one of them is that not
> all the data necessary to check out the latest tree contents can be stored
> near the beginning of the pack data. So "we'll checkout the tip while the
> remainder of the data is still incoming" would not be a workable, unless
> you are willing to destroy the full-clone performance.