I tried on the local disk as well and it didn't help. I managed to find a SUSE11 machine and tried it there but no luck so I think we can eliminate NFS and OS as significant factors now. I ran with perf and here's the report: ESC[31m 69.07%ESC[m git /lib64/libc-2.11.1.so [.] memcpy ESC[31m 12.33%ESC[m git <prefix>/git-1.8.0.rc2.suse11/bin/git [.] blk_SHA1_Block ESC[31m 5.11%ESC[m git <prefix>/zlib/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.5 [.] inflate_fast ESC[32m 2.61%ESC[m git <prefix>/zlib/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.5 [.] adler32 ESC[32m 1.98%ESC[m git /lib64/libc-2.11.1.so [.] _int_malloc ESC[32m 0.86%ESC[m git [kernel] [k] clear_page_c Does this help? Machine has 396GB of RAM if it matters. On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 4:33 PM, Jeff King <peff@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Nov 08, 2012 at 04:16:59PM -0600, Uri Moszkowicz wrote: > >> I ran "git cat-file commit some-tag" for every tag. They seem to be >> roughly uniformly distributed between 0s and 2s and about 2/3 of the >> time seems to be system. My disk is mounted over NFS so I tried on the >> local disk and it didn't make a difference. >> >> I have only one 1.97GB pack. I ran "git gc --aggressive" before. > > Ah. NFS. That is almost certainly the source of the problem. Git will > aggressively mmap. I would not be surprised to find that RHEL4's NFS > implementation is not particularly fast at mmap-ing 2G files, and is > spending a bunch of time in the kernel servicing the requests. > > Aside from upgrading your OS or getting off of NFS, I don't have a lot > of advice. The performance characteristics you are seeing are so > grossly off of what is normal that using git is probably going to be > painful. Your 2s cat-files should be more like .002s. I don't think > there's anything for git to fix here. > > You could try building with NO_MMAP, which will emulate it with pread. > That might fare better under your NFS implementation. Or it might be > just as bad. > > -Peff -- 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