Jeff King [off-list ref] writes:
My HEAD has about 400/3000 non-unique commits, which matches your
numbers percentage-wise. Dropping the lines above (and always freeing)
takes my best-of-five for "git log -g" from 0.085s to 0.080s. Which is
well within the noise. Doing "git log -g Makefile" ended up at 0.183s
both before and after.
... I'd be in favor of
dropping the lines just to decrease complexity of the code.
I think we are in agreement, then.