Re: Bash completion very slow in large repo

From: Matthew Hughes <matthewhughes934@gmail.com>
Date: Aug 15, 2026, 19:52 UTC
Message-ID: <aoDB9roVjgoTeG5l@desktop>
In-Reply-To: <CALnO6CAWA4szRqq_=1kAjB_y6WqA5zSyyMZzPmgnV7KGb+AS7Q@mail.gmail.com>

On Sat, Aug 15, 2026 at 10:17:19AM -0400, D. Ben Knoble wrote:

> Hi Matt, have you tried turning on "feature.manyFiles"? That enables a
> few things (like the fsmonitor) that might help in large repositories.

Ah, thanks for calling that out: I should've mentioned this is in a repo that's already configured via `git-scalar(1)`, so it sets that specific option off, but justifies:

> feature.manyFiles=false
> This disables the "many files" optimizations grouped under this feature config.
> The expectation is that all valuable optimizations are also set explicitly by
> Scalar config, and any differences are intentional.

Though also testing in a fresh repo with no scalar but that option on I didn't see any significant performance change.

I'm also not sure e.g. `git ls-files --exclude-standard --others --directory` knows about things like `fsmonitor`/the untracked cache, like e.g. `git status` does (disclaimer: I'm not at all familiar enough with the code to justify that claim, it's based purely on my qualitative experience, I'm also not sure if it _could_ benefit from such things)

Cheers, Matt