Re: Why Git is so fast (was: Re: Eric Sink's blog - notes on git, dscms and a "whole product" approach)

On Fri, 1 May 2009, david@lang.hm wrote:

the key thing for his problem is the support for large binary objects. there
was discussion here a few weeks ago about ways to handle such things without
trying to pull them into packs. I suspect that solving those sorts of issues
would go a long way towards closing the gap on this workload.

there may be issues in doing a clone for repositories that large, I don't
remember exactly what happens when you have something larger than 4G to send
in a clone.

If you have files larger than 4G then you definitively need a 64-bit 
machine with plenty of RAM for git to at least be able to cope at the 
moment.

That should be easy to add a config option to determine how big is a big 
file, and store those big files directly in a pack of their own instead 
of a loose object (for easy pack reuse during a further repack), and 
never attempt to deltify them, etc. etc.  At which point git will handle 
big files just fine even on a 32-bit machine but it won't do more than 
copying them in and out, and possibly deflating/inflating them while at 
it, but nothing fancier.


Nicolas