Re: Slowness issue with git completion

[Frank Terbeck <ft@bewatermyfriend.org>]

Felipe Contreras wrote:
> It's very easy to reproduce:
> % git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git
> linux
> % cd linux
> % git log v<tab>
>
> It will take a looong time to figure out anything, specially if not
> cached. I think I recall investigating the issue and finding that it's
> looking for *all* the files in the git repo.

Well yes. This is a known issue.

I'm fairly sure that this is due to _multi_parts, which probably doesn't
scale for jobs like that.  I once gave rewriting all that a shot and
ended up with a number of helpers for each "type" of file etc. (like
modified or ignored files).  While they were significantly quicker than
the current code, they were probably still full of bugs and
shortcomings. Also, I would have had to rewrite *large* parts of the
rest of the completion, which would have been a *major* undertaking.

In short: It's a known issue and it's very hard to fix (if only because
it is a *lot* of work).

Regards, Frank

-- 
In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when there is
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
                                                  -- RFC 1925