git is very very slow when tracking large binary files

Question

My project is six months old and git is very very slow. We track around 30 files which are of size 5 MB to 50 MB. Those are binary files and we keep them in git. I believe t

Answer 1

One way of speeding things up is to use the --depth 1 flag. See the man page for details. I am not a great git guru but I believe this says do the equivalent of a p4 get or an svn get, that is it give you only the latest files only instead of "give me all of the revisions of all the files through out all time" which is what git clone does.

Answer 2

Do you garbage collect?

git gc

This makes a significant difference in speed, even for small repos.

Answer 3

Here is a censored revision intended to be less negative and inflammatory:

Git has a well-known weakness when it comes to files that are not line-by-line text files. There is currently no solution, and no plans announced by the core git team to address this. There are workarounds if your project is small, say, 100 MB or so. There exist branches of the git project to address this scalability issue, but these branches are not mature at this time. Some other revision control systems do not have this specific issue. You should consider this issue as just one of many factors when deciding whether to select git as your revision control system.

Answer 4

have you told git those files are binary?

e.g. added *.ext binary to your repository's .gitattributes