Re: Draft release notes for v1.5.3, as of -rc1

[bdowning@lavos.net (Brian Downing)]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2007 at 11:40:39PM -0700, Junio C Hamano wrote:
> GIT v1.5.3 Release Notes (draft)
> ========================
> 
> * New commands and options.

  - "git repack" learned a "window-memory" limit which dynamically
    reduces the window size to stay within the specified memory usage.

"git-repack -a -d -f --window=100000 --window-memory=512m" seems to be
good for those overnight make-it-smaller-damn-the-torpedoes archival
repackings.  (You can't just set --window to BIGNUM as it still
allocates an array of that size.)  Thanks to Nicolas Pitre's depth bias
patch a high --depth doesn't seem to be quite as critical anymore to
save space; it still helps, but things much much better at a lower
depth.

As a point of reference, it took around two hours to repack a repository
containing 108,440 objects, around 35,000 files (most with no history),
and my aforementioned troublesome 20MB RTF file (which uses about 60MB
per revision when sitting in the window due to the delta index cache)
with the above command.  This is on a 2GHz Core 2 Duo in 64-bit mode.

-bcd