Git Bash (mintty) is extremely slow on Windows 10 OS

Question

I installed Git on my Windows 10 a couple of months ago. It worked fine for some time. But now, it's running so slow.

The git status command takes 7 seconds to execute, and git stash takes many minutes for stashing (even if there is nothing to stash). Also, I would like to point out that git status prints the result instantaneously, but I can not enter a new command for a few seconds as shown in the image below.

I have tried surfing the net for solutions to my problem like this, this, etc. but none of these have worked.

P.S.: I use Windows Defender antivirus, and it is NOT making my Bash slow. Also, cmd takes more time to execute git commands while git bash takes a longer time to execute any command.

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Update: I have switched to Ubuntu and therefore, I don't use Windows presently. So, there is no way I can check if any of the solutions work for me. I am accepting the answer provided by @pschild since it has the most number of upvotes and seems to have worked for many people.

Answer 1

I recently ran into the exact same issue. After trying all the advice from this thread and a lot of other threads, I finally found a solution here, respectively in the linked issue here.

Disabling AMD Radeon graphics driver in the Windows device manager and switching to integrated Intel HD graphics worked for me - for whatever reason.

Hope that helps!

In my case, I found sh.exe shell to be significantly faster than bash.exe. You can find sh.exe in git_install_dir/bin.

Hope this helps people having this issue while only having integrated Intel HD graphics!

Answer 2

For me, the solution was to set the HOME variable to my user directory (per this answer). To do this (at least on Windows 7):

1. Right-click on "Computer" in file explorer.
2. Open Advanced System Settings.
3. Open Environment Variables
4. Under System Variables, click "New..."
5. Enter "HOME" for the variable name and the path to your user directory for the value (for example "C:\Users\jdoe").

See also the answers to this related question.

Answer 3

Try again with:

• the latest Git for Windows you can find, like PortableGit-2.12.1-64-bit.7z.exe (unzip it anywhere you want, no setup)

• then in a CMD session, set your PATH with:

  set G=c:\path\to\latest\git
  set PATH=%G%\bin;%G%\usr\bin;%G%\mingw64\bin
  set PATH=%PATH%;C:\windows\system32;C:\windows\System32\Wbem;C:\windows\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\
  

• set your HOME in that same CMD session

  set HOME=%USERPROFILE%
  

• Finally, type bash, and see if any Git operation is still slow.

Answer 4

I had the same problem once and what I found is that the issue for me was with __git_ps1, basically a variable that includes status informationlike branch name, detached head state, in the git dir, in a bare repo, in the middle of cherry picking or rebasing or merging.

In order to speed up your git bash, go to $GitHome\etc\profile and comment out the if-then where __git_ps1 is added to PS1.

Anyway the information that you are commenting out are quite useful, expecially if you are at the beginning with GIT. Here is a faster version, found on the internet and used by me quite succesfully on my system:

fast_git_ps1 ()                                                                              
{                                                                                            
    printf -- "$(git branch 2>/dev/null | grep -e '\* ' | sed 's/^..\(.*\)/ {\1} /')"    
}                                                                                            

PS1='\[\033]0;$MSYSTEM:\w\007                                                                
\033[32m\]\u@\h \[\033[33m\w$(fast_git_ps1)\033[0m\]                                         
$ '     

Answer 5

In response to Lafexlos's bounty:

Disabling AMD Radeon driver solved my issue but I am really wondering on why part.
Would appreciate an answer which focuses on that.

As to why:

Issue 1070 reports.

Bringing up the Radeon settings GUI and clicking on something while waiting for the bash prompt immediately releases something and makes it appear - weird.

AMD was contacted but no response...

This project reports:

But all of the graphic (terminal) output has to be displayed via those drivers.
They (the drivers) get their hooks into all parts of the system with hidden interrupts and time outs and goodness knows what. Shudders..

Issue 1129 adds:

Starting with Windows 7 (maybe Vista?) the console had the ability to display itself via DirectWrite, which is build on top of Direct3D, which is heavily dependent on driver implementations of DirectX API.

As a former NVIDIA employee who worked directly on nvd3dum, nvwgf2umx and nvapi I can tell you we were rather skeptical of the wisdom of this decision.
Seems AMD should have been more skeptical, perhaps their driver quality would have been better.

Answer 6

I had same issue on Windows 7 and Window 10, while using the git bash, any command that I run would take considerable time to execute. Finally after many of head breaking trials, found that issue was due to not running my git bash exe as administrator,

Steps

1. Right click on git bash exe.
2. click on 'run as administrator'
3. type in commands like cd /c/

hope this helps!!!!

Answer 7

Is your PATH full of junk? Simple commands were taking 20 seconds or more for me sometimes until I removed unnecessary things from my PATH.

Windows: echo %PATH%

Search "edit environment variables" to change.

Other: echo $PATH

Answer 8

I have a similar problem but only when I ran git bash as a normal user, when I started git bash as an Administrator all commands ran really fast.

In my case it turned out that the problem was caused by F-Secure antivirus. I added directory containing git.exe to the list of excluded directories (excluded from scanning) and it solved this problem for me.

How to exclude directory: https://community.f-secure.com/t5/Business/Excluding-objects-from-Real-Time/ta-p/66013

Answer 9

Adding process exclusion for bash.exe, cmd.exe and conhost.exe in Windows Defender Exclusions list apparently solved the issue for me on Windows 10 64bit.

Answer 10

Disclaimer: Not a fix. But quick workaround.

For some reason after my computer updated-- I didn't have Git bash on my computer so I had to redownload the new one 2.19.2.windows.1 and I had the same issue with every execution taking 5-7 seconds.

I didn't have time to look into all of the links and disable graphics drivers and what not. But I had Git shell installed with Github on my computer and I pulled that up (Windows PowerShell) and I could run everything on there I needed immediately.