Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add --aggressive option to 'git gc'

From: Theodore Tso <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 9 May 2007 18:22:21 -0400

On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 01:19:54PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> It's tricky that it defaults to 10 and still called aggressive.
> When the configuration variable is left unspecified, the only
> reason it is called aggressive is because it passes '-f' to
> repack, right?  It was not very clear at the first sight and I
> was about to ask why the default is 10, not higher.

Yes, it's called aggressive because it causes git-gc to recalculate
the delta's.  So that means that git-gc --aggressive will take around
9-10 times longer than git-gc.  If the user changes
gc.aggressive-window to some larger value, say like 30, then git-gc
--aggressive would take around 20 times longer than git-gc.

So that's why I didn't make the default bigger, but instead left it as
something which could be configured by the user.  Maybe the default
should be larger; I don't strong opposition towards making it be more
like 30, but it seemed to me that doubling the run time for a 5%
decrease in pack size wasn't worth it.

Regards,

					- Ted