Alex Bennée wrote: >>time /usr/bin/git --no-pager > traversed 223 commits > > real 0m4.817s > user 0m4.320s > sys 0m0.464s I'm quite clueless about why it is taking this long: I think it's IO because there's nothing to compute? I really can't trace anything unless you can reproduce it on a public repository. On linux.git with my rotating hard disk: $ time git describe --debug --long --tags HEAD~10000 searching to describe HEAD~10000 annotated 5445 v2.6.33 annotated 5660 v2.6.33-rc8 annotated 5884 v2.6.33-rc7 annotated 6140 v2.6.33-rc6 annotated 6467 v2.6.33-rc5 annotated 6999 v2.6.33-rc4 annotated 7430 v2.6.33-rc3 annotated 7746 v2.6.33-rc2 annotated 8212 v2.6.33-rc1 annotated 13854 v2.6.32 traversed 18895 commits more than 10 tags found; listed 10 most recent gave up search at 648f4e3e50c4793d9dbf9a09afa193631f76fa26 v2.6.33-5445-ge7c84ee real 0m0.509s user 0m0.470s sys 0m0.037s 18k+ commits traversed in half a second here, so I really don't know what is going on. -- 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