"Gumbel, Matthew K" <matthew.k.gumbel@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > "Junio C Hamano" <jch2355@xxxxxxxxx> writes: >> There probably are other things that can be optimized. > > Yes, I think that when the user passes --only flag to git-commit, then git does not > need to call refresh_cache() in prepare_index() in builtin/commit.c. > > I may experiment with that. Do you see any downside or negative side-effects? There may be other fallouts, but one that immediately comes to mind is that it may break pre-commit hook. When we get "--only", we prepare an temporary index to create the commit out of, and give it to the pre-commit hook. The hook expects that the cached stat information is up-to-date, iow, it does not have to do 'update-index --refresh' before using plumbing commands like "diff-index" to do its own inspection of the working tree.