Subject: Re: git performance

From: Jakub Narebski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:42:51 -0700 (PDT)

"Edward Ned Harvey" <[email-masked]> writes:

> I see things all over the Internet saying git is fast.  I'm
> currently struggling with poor svn performance and poor attitude of
> svn developers, so I'd like to consider switching to git.  A quick
> question first.
> 
> The core of the performance problem I'm facing is the need to "walk
> the tree" for many thousand files.  Every time I do "svn update" or
> "svn status" the svn client must stat every file to check for local
> modifications (a coffee cup or a beer worth of stats).  In essence,
> this is unavoidable if there is no mechanism to constantly monitor
> filesystem activity during normal operations.  Analogous to
> filesystem journaling.
> 
> So - I didn't see anything out there saying "git is fast because it
> uses inotify" or anything like that.  Perhaps git would not help me
> at all?  Because git still needs to stat all the files in the tree?

http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/GitBenchmarks

While it should be possible to use 'assume unchanged' bit together
with inotify / icron, it is not something tha is done; IIRC Mercurial
had Linux-only InotifyPlugin...

-- 
Jakub Narebski
Poland
ShadeHawk on #git