First off, it's not going to "peg your CPU to 100%" for 45 seconds. I just tried a 600 meg file on my dumpy Macbook Pro. 15 seconds tops, and it was never notic

First off, it's not going to "peg your CPU to 100%" for 45 seconds. I just tried a 600 meg file on my dumpy Macbook Pro. 15 seconds tops, and it was never noticeable or prohibitive. Besides, committing is not the bottle neck, it's add, when the hash and gzip are done. And then, besides all that, the major problem with committing blobs to git is that git will store the blob once for each (potentially small) revision that you make. That's not space efficient, but the git community knows about it, and is actively trying to fix it.