To keep the ball rolling, here is my proof of concept in a somewhat cleaned-up form, with still plenty of rough edges. You can play around with it like this: $ GIT_USE_POC_BLOOM_FILTER=$((8*1024*1024*8)) git commit-graph write Computing commit graph generation numbers: 100% (52801/52801), done. Computing bloom filter: 100% (52801/52801), done. # Yeah, I even added progress indicator! :) $ GIT_TRACE_BLOOM_FILTER=2 GIT_USE_POC_BLOOM_FILTER=y git rev-list --count --full-history HEAD -- t/valgrind/valgrind.sh 886 20:40:24.783699 revision.c:486 bloom filter total queries: 66095 definitely not: 64953 maybe: 1142 false positives: 256 fp ratio: 0.003873 The value of $GIT_USE_POC_BLOOM_FILTER only really matters when writing the Bloom filter, and it specifies the number of bits in the filter's bitmap, IOW the above command creates a 8MB Bloom filter. To make use of the filter the variable can be anything non-empty. Writing the Bloom filter is very slow as it is (yeah, that's why bothered with the progress indicator ;). I wrote about it in patch 2's commit message: the cause for about half of the slowness is rather obvious, but I don't (yet) know what's responsible for the other half. Not a single test... but I've run loops over all files in git.git comparing 'git rev-list HEAD -- $file's output with and without the Bloom filter, and, surprisingly, they match. My quick'n'dirty experiments usually don't fare this well... It's also available at: https://github.com/szeder/git bloom-filter-experiment SZEDER Gábor (4): Add a (very) barebones Bloom filter implementation commit-graph: write a Bloom filter containing changed paths for each commit revision.c: use the Bloom filter to speed up path-limited revision walks revision.c: add GIT_TRACE_BLOOM_FILTER for a bit of statistics Makefile | 1 + bloom-filter.c | 103 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ bloom-filter.h | 39 +++++++++++++++ commit-graph.c | 116 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ pathspec.h | 1 + revision.c | 129 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 6 files changed, 389 insertions(+) create mode 100644 bloom-filter.c create mode 100644 bloom-filter.h -- 2.19.1.409.g0a0ee5eb6b