Subject: Re: .git/info/refs

From: "H. Peter Anvin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 07:55:59 -0800

Jakub Narebski wrote:
> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
>> Would it be an incompatible change to add the commit date (and perhaps 
>> the author date) to .git/info/refs?  I believe that would make it 
>> possible to dramatically (orders of magnitude) speed up the generation 
>> of the gitweb index page, which is easily the most expensive gitweb page 
>> to generate.
> 
> With new gitweb and new git it is not that expensive. It is now one call
> to git-for-each-ref per repository.

That IS hugely expensive.  On kernel.org, that is 24175 calls to git.

> Besides, we can't rely that .git/info/refs is up to date, or even exists.
> It is for dumb protocols, not for gitweb.

Well, SOMETHING needs to be done for this page, since it can take 15 
minutes or more to generate.  Caching doesn't help one iota, since it's 
stale before being generated.

	-hpa