Re: slowness in pulling data to mobile devices using git

From: Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>
Date: Apr 22, 2011, 03:41 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.2.00.1104212332310.24613@xanadu.home>
In-Reply-To: <4DB0B608.5090704@gmail.com>

On Thu, 21 Apr 2011, Qianqian Fang wrote:

> hi list
> 
> I am not sure if this is the right place to ask.

Yes, it is.

Show 11 quoted lines

> I am having some difficulties to speed up synchronization of a large 
> git repo (~4GB) to a mobile phone via USB cable. It appears that the 
> "git pull" command has to read through the entire history to make a 
> single update, even the update is very minor.
> 
> I post my full question at this link:
> 
> http://groups.google.com/group/git-users/browse_thread/thread/9f33536257535b28?hl=en
> 
> does this make sense? is there a way to speed up
> the updating without letting git to do all the file readings?

try doing "git fetch" instead of "git pull". That should make the actual transfer faster without looking at the local checked-out files.

Also, make sure the repository on your SD card is fully packed. You'll need to repack it by mounting the SD card on a PC with sufficient amount of RAM.

If the repo is checked out on your SD card, and if it contains a large number of files, then any status-like operation (checkout, pull) will need to stat every file which may take time on a slow storage link. And if your phone changes the dates of those files then Git has no choice but to read the entire file in order to determine if the file is still the same or not.

Nicolas