On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 11:33:40AM -0600, Nasser Grainawi wrote: > I have a situation where I need to delete 100k+ refs on 15+ separate > hosts/disks. This setup is using Gerrit replication, so I can trigger > it all on one host and it will push the deletes to the rest (all > running git-daemon v2.18.0 with receive-pack enabled). All the refs > being deleted on the receiving ends are packed. > > What I see is the packed-refs file getting locked/updated over and > over for each ref. I had assumed it would do something more like > 'update-ref --stdin' and do a bulk removal of refs. Am I seeing the > correct behavior? If yes, is there a specific reason it works this way > or is "bulk delete through push" just a feature that hasn't been > implemented yet? The underlying ref code is smart enough to coalesce all of the deletions in a single transaction into a single write of the packed-refs file. But historically, pushes do not do a single ref transaction because we would allow the push for one ref to succeed while others failed. Later, we added an "atomic" mode that does it all in a single transaction. Try with "git push --atomic", which should be able to do it in a single write. -Peff