git commit results in many lstat()s

Hello,

My high level problem is to speed up git commit on a large repository stored on NFS filesystem. I see via strace that it is slow because it makes a large number (~50,000) of lstat() calls in serial. Every call is a round-trip to the NFS server.

I do not understand why git commit must call lstat() on every file in the repository, even when I specify the name of the file I want to commit on the command line. Can somebody explain why it must call lstat on every file?

My command-line looks like this: git commit -uno -o -m asdf file-to-commit.txt

Secondly, are there any optimizations I can make to avoid this behavior?

Thanks,
Matt