fREW SchmidtI'm not really sure how to reproduce this without sharing my whole repo so I'll explain it first.
I did a fairly large merge today at work and in the process, so that I could skim some stuff, I set gitk to have zero lines of context. After finally committing the merge, if I ran gitk, it would consume an entire core trying to (I'm guessing) render the diff for gitk. It never completed, and even after closing gitk, there was still a git process in the background pegging a core. If I fix the lines of context to be 3 again and restart gitk the problem goes away.
This occurred on ubuntu with git 1.7.6.
-- fREW Schmidt http://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com