Subject: Re: People unaware of the importance of "git gc"?

From: Steven Grimm <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 06 Sep 2007 11:29:07 -0700

Linus Torvalds wrote:
> IOW, if you get lots of small incrmental packs, after a while you really 
> *do* need to do "git gc" to get the real pack generated.
>   

I wonder if it makes sense to repack just the small incremental packs 
into a large (but still incremental) pack, rather than repacking the 
entire repository. Presumably that would be a lot faster than a full 
"git gc", while still giving you reasonably good packing (at least, if 
the threshold is set to a hugh enough number of small packs) and keeping 
things fast. That could run as a second phase of "git gc --auto" -- it 
should be quick enough to not be too terribly annoying since we're not 
running it in the background.

Yeah, if you use the same repo for a long time, you'll accumulate a ton 
of medium-sized packs this way, but (a) that's much better than the 
situation we have today, and (b) it puts off the performance degradation 
for long enough that it becomes more reasonable to expect people to find 
out about running the full "git gc" in the meantime, or for git to 
further evolve to not need it.

-Steve