On Fri, 20 Apr 2007, Junio C Hamano wrote:
I would propose removing the progress meter for "Checking out
files" in unpack-trees, for the same reason.
Have you tried this with something like the kernel on a 128MB machine, or
over NFS? Or, indeed, if you just do
echo 5 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_background_ratio
echo 2 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio
or similar, to tell the kernel to not allow a lot of dirty files.
No, I've not tried it either, but you may think that checking files out is
fast just because you're actually just writing to memory, and the
background writeout will do the real work. That isn't always true.
Checking files out can be very expensive indeed.
Linus