Jeff,
Thank you for the advice, I will reduce the depth.
Running "git pack-objects --all --no-reuse-delta --delta-base-offset --stdout </dev/null >/dev/null", it got to 99% fairly quickly, now it has 5 threads running (using 99.9% CPU), but the "dstat 5" still shows lots of nothing, with some heavy system activity:
--total-cpu-usage-- -dsk/total- -net/total- ---paging-- ---system--
usr sys idl wai stl| read writ| recv send| in out | int csw
1 8 91 0 0| 166k 224k| 0 0 | 0 0 |6892 970
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 333B 1758B| 0 0 |2285 1374
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 309B 1190B| 0 0 |2233 1265
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 282B 1053B| 0 0 |2174 1239
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 278B 1251B| 0 0 |1930 1173
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 274B 942B| 0 0 |1987 1139
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 264B 1168B| 0 0 |1928 1205
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 388B 2435B| 0 0 |2245 1280
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 268B 1145B| 0 0 |2225 1221
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 164B 732B| 0 0 |2607 1333
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 156B 996B| 0 0 |2100 1270
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 206B 1019B| 0 0 |2192 1296
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 198B 824B| 0 0 |2019 1236
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 245B 435B| 0 0 |1974 1195
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 252B 855B| 0 0 |1852 1166
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 230B 758B| 0 0 |2066 1299
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 284B 925B| 0 0 |1860 1225
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 289B 2682B| 0 0 |1796 1197
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 | 939B 1263B| 0 0 |1913 1304
0 13 87 0 0| 0 0 |1212B 1366B| 0 0 |1915 1343
I will try running the command under the debugger and stop it when it gets to this point and poke around.
florin