Re: People unaware of the importance of "git gc"?

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
To: Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org>
Cc: Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>, Steven Grimm <koreth@midwinter.com>,
	Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>,
	Git Mailing List <git@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: People unaware of the importance of "git gc"?
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:46:59 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <7v1wdciy3w.fsf@gitster.siamese.dyndns.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.9999.0709051634190.21186@xanadu.home> (Nicolas Pitre's message of "Wed, 05 Sep 2007 16:35:19 -0400 (EDT)")

Nicolas Pitre <nico@cam.org> writes:

>> This patch does not add invocation of the "auto repacking".  It
>> is left to key Porcelain commands that could produce tons of
>> loose objects to add a call to "git gc --auto" after they are
>> done their work.  Obvious candidates are:
>> 
>> 	git add
>
> Nope!  'git add' creates loose objects which are not yet reachable from 
> anywhere.  They won't get repacked until a commit is made.

Bzzt, I am releaved to see you are sometimes wrong ;-)

They are reachable from the index and are not subject to
pruning.

>> 	git fetch
>
> I think that would be a much better idea to simply decrease the 
> fetch.unpackLimit default value.

One thing that I find lacking in that auto patch is actually
that we should sometimes consolidate multiple small packs into a
single larger one.  Any behaviour change to encourage creation
of many tiny packs should be avoided until it materializes.

Probably we should introduce a built-in minimum value for a
positive gc.auto, somewhere around 1000 or so, for this reason.