Subject: Re: serious performance issues with images, audio files, and other "non-code" data

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 12:15:41 -0700 (PDT)

John <[email-masked]> writes:

> We're seeing serious performance issues with repos that store media
> files, even relatively small files. For example, a web site with less
> than 100 MB of images can take minutes to commit, push, or pull when
> images have changed.
> 
> Our first guess was that git is repeatedly attempting to
> compress/decompress data that had already been compressed. We tried
> these configuration settings (shooting in the dark) to no avail:
> 
>     core.compression 0   ## Docs say this disables compression. Didn't seem to work.
>     pack.depth 1     ## Unclear what this does.
>     pack.window 0    ## No idea what this does.
>     gc.auto 0        ## We hope this disables automatic packing.
> 
> Our guess that re-compression is to blame may not even be valid since
> we can manually re-compress these files in seconds, not minutes.
> 
> Is there a trick to getting git to simply "copy files as is"?  In
> other words, don't attempt to compress them, don't attempt to "diff"
> them, just store/copy/transfer the files as-is?

Search for `delta` attribute, which should be unset for files that you
don't want for git to attempt (binary) delta against, in gitattributes
manpage.

P.S. There is also git-bigfiles project that migth be of interest to
you.
-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git