Slow Git operations

Question

I've got a test repository that I put under Git. Most of the files are pretty tiny but there's a very large number of them and simply Git operations like add and status are taking tens of minutes to complete. What are my options for putting these under revision control and getting reasonable performance? Should I attempt to use submodules or should I steer clear of DVCSes?

Answer 1

Git operations like add and status require stating every file in the filesystem (to detect changes). Either you have a truly massive number of files (say, tens or hundreds of thousands of files), or you have a filesystem that has a rather slow stat operation.

In any case, if you need to work on a system where this is extremely slow, you can use the "assume unchanged" bit in the index, which tells Git not to bother stating the file. If you do turn this on, you need to manually instruct git to pick up changes in individual files, e.g. by passing them directly to git add, otherwise Git won't even know anything changed. You can turn this on by setting git config core.ignoreStat true and then running something like git reset --hard HEAD.