Git performance results on a large repository Date: 2012-02-03 14:20:06 GMT Hi Git folks, We (Facebook) have been investigating source control systems to meet our growing needs. We already use git fairly widely, but have noticed it getting slower as we grow, and we want to make sure we have a good story going forward. We're debating how to proceed and would like to solicit people's thoughts. To better understand git scalability, I've built up a large, synthetic repository and measured a few git operations on it. I summarize the results here. The test repo has 4 million commits, linear history and about 1.3 million files. The size of the .git directory is about 15GB, and has been repacked with 'git repack -a -d -f --max-pack-size=10g --depth=100 --window=250'. This repack took about 2 days on a beefy machine (I.e., lots of ram and flash). The size of the index file is 191 MB. I can share the script that generated it if people are interested - It basically picks 2-5 files, modifies a line or two and adds a few lines at the end consisting of random dictionary words, occasionally creates a new file, commits all the modifications and repeats. I timed a few common operations with both a warm OS file cache and a cold cache. i.e., I did a 'echo 3 | tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' and then did the operation in question a few times (first timing is the cold timing, the next few are the warm timings). The following results are on a server with average hard drive (I.e., not flash) and > 10GB of ram. 4 million commits 1.3 million files 15 GB http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/189776 git add: 7 seconds git status: 39 minutes git commit: 41 minutes