On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:10 PM, Ramkumar Ramachandra <artagnon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > For large repositories, many simple git commands like `git status` > take a while to respond. I understand that this is because of large > number of stat() calls to figure out which files were changed. I > overheard that Mercurial wants to solve this problem using itnotify, > but the idea bothers me because it's not portable. Will Git ever > consider using inotify on Linux? What is the downside? There's one relatively easy sub-task of this that I haven't seen mentioned: Improving the speed of interactive rebase on large (as in lots of checked out files) repositories. That's the single biggest thing that bothers me when I use Git with large repos, not the speed of "git status". When you "git rebase -i HEAD~100" re-arrange some patches and save the TODO list it takes say 0.5-1s for each patch to be applied, but at least 10x less than that on a small repository. E.g. try this on linux-2.6.git v.s. some small project with a few dozen files. I looked into this a long while ago and remembered that rebase was doing something like a git status for every commit that it made to check the dirtyness. This could be vastly improved by having an unsafe option to git-rebase where it just assumes that the starting state + whatever it wrote out is the current state, i.e. it would break if someone stuck up on your checkout during an interactive rebase and changed a file, but the common case of the user having exclusive access to the repo and waiting for the rebase would be much faster. -- 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