git filter-branches - no progress at end

Question

I just converted a 10G CVS repo (about 120 modules) in one single git repo using cvs2git without any errors on a RHEL5 machine. I'd like to split one subdirectory+history off the repository and create a new one. (Like: How can I move a single directory from a git repository to a new repository whilst maintaining the history?)

I tried:

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter xxx.model -- --all

which works fine, until the last item is processed - then it hangs using CPU without any progress. Using strace, it looks something like this: [broken link]. strace-ing all forks ends up in a >2.5G output - I don't know if it grows bigger; I stopped it.

What is causing that strange behaviour? Is there any other method of creating a new repository with a subdirectory+history of an existing repository?

Answer 1

The operation finished successfully after hours of running. The only problem was, that it seemed for us that there is no progress, but that's not true. There's just no output.

Set GIT_TRACE=1 and redo the command and there is output and progress visible.

It's possible that the high amount of tags caused the operation to slow down.