On Tue, 12 Feb 2008, Jon Smirl wrote: > > How many diffs should it take to compress a 2000 delta chain with > window/depth=250? There's no fixed answer. We do various culling heurstics to avoid actually generating a diff at all if it looks unlikely to succeed etc. But in general, the way the window works is that (a) we only need to generate the _unpacked_ object once (b) we compare each object to the "window-1" preceding objects, which is how I got the O(windowsize^2) (c) but then that "compare" relatively seldom involves actually generating a whole diff! So the answer is: in _theory_ each object may be compared to (windowsize-1) other objects, but in practice it's much less than that. Linus - 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