Re: [PATCH] Kill the useless progress meter in merge-recursive

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Apr 20, 2007, 15:14 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0704200811470.9964@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <7vd51z317c.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>

On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:

> 
> I would propose removing the progress meter for "Checking out
> files" in unpack-trees, for the same reason.

Have you tried this with something like the kernel on a 128MB machine, or over NFS? Or, indeed, if you just do

	echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
	echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio

or similar, to tell the kernel to not allow a lot of dirty files.

No, I've not tried it either, but you may think that checking files out is fast just because you're actually just writing to memory, and the background writeout will do the real work. That isn't always true. Checking files out can be very expensive indeed.

		Linus