I was doing some experiments today with large-ish (100-200MB) binary files and was trying to determine the best configuration for Git. Here are the steps and timings I saw: git init Test cp .../largemovie.mp4 . time git add largemovie.mp4 This took 6.5s for a 200MB file. This file compressed a little bit, but not enough to matter, so I wanted to see how much faster the add would be with compression disabled. So I ran: git config core.compression = 0 I then completely reran the test above starting with a clean repository. This time the add took only 2.08s. I repeated these two tests about 10 times using the same file each time to verify it wasn't related to disk caching, etc. At this point I decided that this was likely a good setting for this repository, so I also created a .gitattributes file and added a few entries often seen in suggestions for dealing with binary files: *.mp4 binary -delta The goal here was to disable any delta compression done during a gc/pack and use the other settings 'binary' applies. Unfortunately when I ran the test again (still using compression = 0), the test was back to taking 6.5s and the file inside the .git/objects/ folder was compressed again. I narrowed this down to the '-text' attribute that is set when specifying 'binary'. For some reason this flag is cancelling out the core.compression = 0 setting and I think this is a bug? Unfortunately core.compression = 0 is also global. Ideally it would be great if there was a separate 'compression' attribute that could be specified in .gitattributes per wildcard similar to how -delta can be used. This way we would still be able to get compression for text/source files, while still getting the speed of skipping compression for binary files that do not compress well. Has there been any discussion on having an attribute similar to this? Thanks, -Doug