Re: cloning the kernel - why long time in "Resolving 313037 deltas"

On Tue, 19 Dec 2006, Theodore Tso wrote:

So the main reason to use mamp, as Linus puts it, is if the management
overhead of needing to read lots of small bits of the file makes the
use of malloc/read to be a pain in the *ss, then go for it.

An example of this in git is the regular pack-file accesses. We're MUCH 
better off just mmap'ing the whole pack-file (or at least big chunks of 
it) and not having to maintain difficult structures of "this is where I 
read that part of the file into memory", or read _big_ chunks when 
quite often we just use a few kB of it.

So mmap for pack-files does make sense, but probably only when you can 
mmap big chunks, and are going to access much smaller (random) parts of 
it.