Re: gitk normal use on linux repo and severe memory pressure

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 11:20:24AM -0400, Martin Langhoff wrote:

> An anecdotical report: Right today, I fired up gitk on a linux-2.6.39
> checkout to review some new patches. While discussing the patches with
> other developers on irc, my machine (arguably, RAM-constrained at 1GB)
> started to hit swap heavily.

Yeah, gitk on linux-2.6 tops out at around 1.6GB on my machine. Ouch.
That's 6-7K per commit. In git.git, it's similar (7-8K per commit).
For comparison, all of "git log --pretty=raw" for linux-2.6 is only
about 180M, or ~0.7K per commit.

Obviously there is going to be some overhead with organizing the data,
but that is really quite a lot.

> Are there efforts afoot to teach gitk to read in _some_ history and
> pause, continuing if the user scrolls down? Not sure if searches are
> done in-memory in gitk -- which probably complicates things.

Not that I know of. But it seems like there might be some room to
optimize gitk's storage. I know absolutely nothing about how commits are
stored now, though, so it's possible I'm completely wrong.

-Peff