Just thought that I should add some numbers to this thread as it seems that the later versions of git are worse off by several orders of magnitude on this one. We have a Gerrit repo with just under 100K refs in refs/changes/*. When I fetch them all with git 1.7.6 it does not seem to complete. Even after 5 days, it is just under half way through the ref #s! It appears, but I am not sure, that it is getting slower with time also, so it may not even complete after 10 days, I couldn't wait any longer. However, the same command works in under 8 mins with git 1.7.3.3 on the same machine! Syncing 100K refs: git 1.7.6 > 8 days? git 1.7.3.3 ~8mins That is quite a difference! Have there been any obvious changes to git that should cause this? If needed, I can bisect git to find out where things go sour, but I thought that perhaps there would be someone who already understands the problem and why older versions aren't nearly as bas as recent ones. Some more things that I have tried: after syncing the repo locally with all 100K refs under refs/changes, I cloned it locally again and tried fetching locally with both git 1.7.6 and 1.7.3.3. I got the same results as remotely, so it does not appear to be related to round trips. The original git remote syncing takes just a bit of time, and then it outputs lines like these: ... * [new branch] refs/changes/13/66713/2 -> refs/changes/13/66713/2 * [new branch] refs/changes/13/66713/3 -> refs/changes/13/66713/3 * [new branch] refs/changes/13/66713/4 -> refs/changes/13/66713/4 * [new branch] refs/changes/13/66713/5 -> refs/changes/13/66713/5 ... This is the part that takes forever. The lines seem to scroll by slower and slower (with git 1.7.6). In the beginning, the lines might be a screens worth a minute, after 5 days, about 1 a minute. My CPU is pegged at 100% during this time (one core). Since I have some good test data for this, let me know if I should test anything specific. Thanks, -Martin Employee of Qualcomm Innovation Center, Inc. which is a member of Code Aurora Forum -- View this message in context: http://git.661346.n2.nabble.com/Git-is-not-scalable-with-too-many-refs-tp6456443p6773496.html Sent from the git mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe git" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html