I’ve identified that retrieving tags and their notes is a performance issue, especially in large repositories with hundreds of tags.

The current implementation calls git notes twice (due to backward compatibility for some older semantic-release versions) for each tag, sequentially. Here is the problematic parthttps://github.com/semantic-release/semantic-release/blob/master/lib/branches/get-tags.js#L24

I found out that notes for each tag can be obtained in a single command, which takes only a few milliseconds. Here is the command I used (should cover the older notes refs as well):

git log --tags="*" --decorate-refs="refs/tags/*" --no-walk --format="%d%x09%N" --notes="refs/notes/semantic-release*"

And the example output for this repository:

 (tag: v24.2.5) (tag: v24.2.4) (tag: v24.2.3){"channels":[null]} (tag: v24.2.2){"channels":[null]} (tag: v24.2.1){"channels":[null]} (tag: v24.2.0){"channels":[null]}

The retrieved tags and their notes are fetched all at once (takes only a few ms) and then parsed and converted to a map.

This change shaves off a few minutes from our CI job.

Related#2827,#3689,#3594