On 02/28/2014 12:38 AM, Lee Hopkins wrote: > [...] Based Michael Haggerty's response, it seems that always > using loose refs would be a better workaround. No, I answered the question "what would be the disadvantages of using only packed refs?". Now I will answer the question "what would be the disadvantages of using only loose refs?": 1. Efficiency. Any time all of the references have to be read, loose refs are far slower than packed refs. 2. Disk space and inode usage: loose refs consume one inode and one disk sector (typically 4k) each, whereas packed refs consume only one inode in total, and many packed refs can fit into each disk sector. After all, there is a reason that we have both packed refs and loose refs. The basic idea is to use packed refs for the bulk of references, especially "cold" references like tags that only change infrequently, but to store "hot" references as loose refs so that they can be modified cheaply. 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