Re: Git benchmarks at OpenOffice.org wiki

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 2 May 2007, Jakub Narebski wrote:
> On 5/2/07, Johannes Schindelin <Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> > 
> > Something I realized with pain is that the refs/ directory is 24MB big.
> > Yep. Really. They have 3464 heads and 2639 tags. I suspect that this is
> > the reason why.
> 
> Then packed refs would certainly help with speed and a bit with size.

Btw, this reminds me: we really should start out clones with a fully 
packed set of refs. It seems stupid to get the refs in one go, and then 
explode them into thousands of files.

A trivial patch is to just do

	git pack-refs --all --prune

in the "git-clone.sh" script rather than force people to do it themselves, 
but we really probably shouldn't have ever even unpacked them in the first 
place. That is kind of stupid, but especially since that thing is written 
in shell, it's hard to do anything smarter.

Of course, I don't know what the hell openoffice is doing with that many 
branches and tags, but I guess it's a normal result of having used CVS/SVN 
- you want to tag every single merge you do, and all branches stay around 
forever, because you can never merge them back and get rid of them.

It's always sad to see the crap that is CVS, and how bad decisions in CVS 
end up resulting in pain downstream.

		Linus