Re: Partial fetch?

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 10:34:51PM +0200, Dāvis Mosāns wrote:

> I'm trying to fetch a remote repository over https but sadly it
> timeouts too soon.
> 
> $ git fetch -v upstream
> POST git-upload-pack (gzip 1148 to 641 bytes)
> POST git-upload-pack (gzip 1148 to 644 bytes)
> [...]
> Is there some way to fetch partially by smaller chunks and then repeat
> that again till everything is fetched?

Not an easy one. The series of POSTs is an indication that the fetch
negotiation is going on for a long time, which probably means you have a
lot of commits in your local repository that aren't in the remote, or
vice versa.

Here are the things I might try:

  - git v2.10.2 has commit 06b3d386e (fetch-pack: do not reset in_vain
    on non-novel acks, 2016-09-23), which may help with this.

  - HTTP, because the server is stateless, performs less well than other
    protocols. If you can fetch over ssh or git://, it will probably
    just work.

  - If this is a one-time thing to fetch unrelated history from another
    repository, you can "clone --mirror" instead of fetching,
    then fetch from the mirror locally. Subsequent fetches should be
    fast.

If you do try v2.10.2 and it improves things, I'd be interested to hear
about it as a data point.

-Peff