git-gui is slow to display a large number of changed/new files

git-gui is slow to display a large number of changed/new files

[Dan Zwell]

Hello,

I was recently working on a project with tens of thousands of generated 
files. The generated directory was not intended to be tracked by git, 
but I had forgotten to add it to .gitignore. When I tried to use 
git-gui, it seemed to hang for about a minute. The problem is that 
creating the icons in the "staged changes" and "unstaged changes" 
windows is very slow. This data is redisplayed after several operations, 
and the lag makes git-gui unusable.

Is this behavior worth changing? I doubt the scenario I encountered is a 
common one. However, I have written a patch to display at most 5000 
changed/new files, warning the user that the list has been truncated. If 
this is a worthy change, I can submit the patch--I can also change it so 
that the maximum number of displayed files is taken from git's 
configuration.

Thanks
-Daniel

Re: git-gui is slow to display a large number of changed/new files

[Alex Riesen]

2009/6/29 Dan Zwell <dzwell@zwell.net>:
> Is this behavior worth changing? I doubt the scenario I encountered is a
> common one.

It happens. There are imported repositories, and things like CVS/SVN/Perforce
force people to do giant commits. So yes, it definitely is worth looking into.

> ... However, I have written a patch to display at most 5000
> changed/new files, warning the user that the list has been truncated. If
> this is a worthy change, I can submit the patch--I can also change it so
> that the maximum number of displayed files is taken from git's
> configuration.

Even 5000 is insane, so that would be a good start, for sure.

Paul Mackerras is gitk's maintainer, remember to put him on Cc: