I ask help to the list because my knowledge on this is not enough. Currently qgit uses, socket based, QProcess class to read data from 'git rev-list' when loading the repository at startup. The time it takes to read, without processing, the whole Linux tree with this approach it's almost _double_ of the time it takes 'git rev-list' to write to a file: $git rev-list --header --boundary --parents --topo-order HEAD >> tmp.txt We are talking of about 7s against less then 4s, on my box (warm cache). So I have a patch to make 'git rev-list' writing into a temporary file and then read it in memory, perhaps it's not the cleaner way, but it's faster, about 1s less. I have browsed Qt sources and found that QProcess uses internal buffers that are then copied again before to be used by the application. File approach uses a call to read() /fread() buired inside the Qt's QFile class, and no intermediate buffers, so perhaps this could be the reason the second way it's faster. Anyway there are some issues: 1) File tmp.txt is deleted as soon as read, but this is not enough sometimes to avoid a costly and wasteful write access to disk by the OS. What is the easiest, portable way to create a temporary 'in memory only' file, with no disk access? Or at least delay the HD write access enough to be able to read and delete the file before the fist block of tmp.txt is flushed to disk? 2) There is a faster/cleaner (and *safe* ) way to access directly 'git rev-list' output, something like (just as an example): $git rev-list --header --boundary --parents --topo-order HEAD >> /dev/mem Or something similar, possibly _simple_ and _portable_ , so to be able to copy the big amount of 'git rev-list' output just once (about 30MB with current tree). 3) Other suggestions? ;-) Thanks Marco - 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