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I never faced git performance issues when working with code. Guess my repos weren't bit. But when I tried to use git as a versioned database of changes in my pet project, I learned a lot about indexes, compacting, etc. Article covers a lot and is very helpful!
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Git is noticeably slow on Windows. Git is built to run on top of Unix commands, which work great on Linux and Mac. For Windows, the commands have to be installed separately, and there's a performance penalty for each call. Individual Git commands are usually fine, but anything that calls several steps in sequence will visibly drag.

(WSL gets around this entirely.)


afaik far bigger factor is that windows file io is just generally much slower than linux. both of these are further exacerbated by av solutions which are ubiquitous in windows. that is why ms introduced "dev drive" in windows few years back which in their own benchmarks showed biggest gain specifically with git: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2023/06/01/dev-dr...

I hardly see developers with Windows anymore, I guess this is one of the many reasons.

I have to use Windows for work. With WSL, it's actually perfectly fine! Which is really more of an endorsement of Linux than Windows.

I last developed on Windows in the time where I had to fiddle with Git Bash, Cygwin and manually setting my PATH. It was not a fun time.



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