From: Linus Torvalds Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:47:52 GMT Subject: Re: New features in gitk Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <18217.47744.621850.100789@cargo.ozlabs.ibm.com> On Thu, 1 Nov 2007, Paul Mackerras wrote: > > Linus Torvalds writes: > > The cost is not generally in outputting the commits. The real cost is in > > traversing them in the first place. > > Actually, the biggest cost is still gitk reading in the commits from > git log and doing the processing that gitk needs to do on each commit > (which I have tried to minimize, and is way smaller than it used to > be, but is still significant). Umm. I think you're basing all your timings on hot-cache numbers. The hot-cache numbers are already pretty damn good. But try this: echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches gitk on a big repository, _especially_ one that isn't totally packed, or on a machine with a slow laptop disk. Just following the commit history is really quite expensive. THAT is the problem with --topo-order. Linus