Re: [GSoC] Designing a faster index format

On Tue, 3 Apr 2012, Thomas Gummerer wrote:

Lets take another scenario. Someone changes a lot of files and then executes
some commands which would usually only read the index. In that case either you
would need the load time (O(n)) plus the time for merging (O(k*log(n)), as
described above plus the time for writing the index (O(n)) which usually wouldn't
be necessary.

note that in a large repository you are not that likely to change a very 
large percentage of the files with one update. yes, there are some use 
cases where this happens, but in general, the number of files changed in a 
changeset grows at a much slower rate than the total number of files in a 
repository. As projects get big they tend to get fewer across-the-board 
changes.

David Lang