On 11/22/2011 06:31 PM, Jay Soffian wrote: > I wonder what the downside would be of always using packed refs on > case-insenstive file systems. This would seem analogous to how git no > longer uses symlinks. The theoretical downside is that when the total number of packed refs is very large, it is more expensive to access or change a single ref if it is packed than if it is loose (because the whole packed refs file has to be read, parsed, then rewritten, and thus scales like O(N)). OTOH the number of references must be quite large before loose references win, because the constant factor for loose references is much larger than that for packed references. I also believe that there is still scope for optimizing the handling of packed references to make them yet faster and perhaps even improve their scaling. But I think that a lot of code would have to change to make this happen. Michael -- Michael Haggerty mhagger@xxxxxxxxxxxx http://softwareswirl.blogspot.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