6 ms·

Can someone explain how git can be slow for these folks while the Linux kernel continues to use git? Do these performance issues plague Linus as well? Or is the

Can someone explain how git can be slow for these folks while the Linux kernel continues to use git? Do these performance issues plague Linus as well? Or is the Linux kernel smaller than the code in TFA?

wereHamster 6y ago
The Linux kernel is not a big project. Sure, it's bigger than your average one-file-one-function-npm-package, but not as big as people think. Dropbox, Google, Facebook, … their repositories are far larger, perhaps by several orders of magnitude.
harpratap 6y ago
> Interestingly, git status was 5-10x faster on Linux compared to macOS. From the article. That's a very big difference.
- ublaze 6y ago
  Precisely.
  - harpratap 6y ago
    At what point just investing in a Linux distro for your employees makes more financial sense? I have similar issues with docker-on-mac where it keeps using 100% of my cpu (https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499 https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499) because of which my 2 year old Macbook's screen has started dying due to overheating so much (https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/567125/Horizontal+line+on+bottom+of+MacBook+Pro+2017+(Due+to+overheating) https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/567125/Horizontal+line+o... It would be better if the corporate developers just moved onto Linux Distros. The software and hardware quality is 99% there already.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I came across a neat infographic the other day comparing source code repositires, had to google for a while but here it is: https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-biggest-codebases-in-history-a128bb3eea73 https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-biggest-codebases-in-h... TL;DR, the Linux codebase there (version 3.1) is about 15M LOC, versus e.g. Windows Vista at 50M, MacOS at 85M, and Google at 2B. Not sure where Dropbox fits in that, but it's probably a similar order of magnitude to Linux and co.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I wonder where they got those numbers.
alkonaut 6y ago
Kernel is tiny. Whole repo is like 1.5GB. That's nothing. We are just 20 devs, not a massive company and I'm on 100k commit, 50Gb history repo.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  That’s a massive repository…I’ve worked in code with many hundreds of thousands of commits from many, many people and they’re a couple gigabytes at most. Are you storing assets in your tree?
  - alkonaut 6y ago
    Yes a lot of it is non-text content (By file count not so much, but by size probably 80% or more). Nothing unnecesary, but resourcees required to build and test each revision (Not e.g. documentation). It's a document based and graphical app (CAD) so it is not practical to store separate non-text assets from the source tree. Each branch has different versions of various test inputs/outputs, drawings, image resources etc. We use git LFS obviously, otherwise this whole setup would be impossible. In all, it's actually a decent experience. We couldn't migrate off Subversion until LFS was stable, but now that it is, Git is actually a quite good VCS for the "Subversion use case" (Large, central, heavy in binaries).

wereHamster 6y ago

The Linux kernel is not a big project. Sure, it's bigger than your average one-file-one-function-npm-package, but not as big as people think. Dropbox, Google, Facebook, … their repositories are far larger, perhaps by several orders of magnitude.

harpratap 6y ago

> Interestingly, git status was 5-10x faster on Linux compared to macOS. From the article. That's a very big difference.

ublaze 6y ago
Precisely.
- harpratap 6y ago
  At what point just investing in a Linux distro for your employees makes more financial sense? I have similar issues with docker-on-mac where it keeps using 100% of my cpu (https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499 https://github.com/docker/for-mac/issues/3499) because of which my 2 year old Macbook's screen has started dying due to overheating so much (https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/567125/Horizontal+line+on+bottom+of+MacBook+Pro+2017+(Due+to+overheating) https://www.ifixit.com/Answers/View/567125/Horizontal+line+o... It would be better if the corporate developers just moved onto Linux Distros. The software and hardware quality is 99% there already.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago

I came across a neat infographic the other day comparing source code repositires, had to google for a while but here it is: https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-biggest-codebases-in-history-a128bb3eea73 https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-biggest-codebases-in-h... TL;DR, the Linux codebase there (version 3.1) is about 15M LOC, versus e.g. Windows Vista at 50M, MacOS at 85M, and Google at 2B. Not sure where Dropbox fits in that, but it's probably a similar order of magnitude to Linux and co.

saagarjha 6y ago
I wonder where they got those numbers.

alkonaut 6y ago

Kernel is tiny. Whole repo is like 1.5GB. That's nothing. We are just 20 devs, not a massive company and I'm on 100k commit, 50Gb history repo.

saagarjha 6y ago
That’s a massive repository…I’ve worked in code with many hundreds of thousands of commits from many, many people and they’re a couple gigabytes at most. Are you storing assets in your tree?
- alkonaut 6y ago
  Yes a lot of it is non-text content (By file count not so much, but by size probably 80% or more). Nothing unnecesary, but resourcees required to build and test each revision (Not e.g. documentation). It's a document based and graphical app (CAD) so it is not practical to store separate non-text assets from the source tree. Each branch has different versions of various test inputs/outputs, drawings, image resources etc. We use git LFS obviously, otherwise this whole setup would be impossible. In all, it's actually a decent experience. We couldn't migrate off Subversion until LFS was stable, but now that it is, Git is actually a quite good VCS for the "Subversion use case" (Large, central, heavy in binaries).