Re: Handling very large numbers of symbolic references?

[Nix <nix@esperi.org.uk>]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, Rene Scharfe said:
> Nix schrieb:
>> However, this causes a potential problem. There are tens of thousands of
>> these bugs, and the .git/refs/heads directory gets *enormous* and thus
>> the system gets terribly terribly slow (crappy old Solaris filesystem
>> syndrome).
>> 
>> It seems to me there are two ways to fix this:
>> 
>>  - restructure .git/refs/* in a similar way to .git/objects, i.e. as a
>>    one- or two-level tree.
> 
> Branch names are allowed to contain slashes, thus your porcelain is free
> to implement such a tree.  Add a slash after every two bug ID digits and
> your directories will never contain more than 100 objects.

Oh, lovely! I was *sure* I'd need to make git core changes for this, but
no, the precognitive powers of the git hackers had anticipated my needs
before I knew what they were!

(Now the only downside is gitweb's treatment of such heads: but looking
at the code, making it skip suitably formatted heads when displaying the
heads list is an utterly trivial one-liner.)

-- 
`We're sysadmins. We deal with the inconceivable so often I can clearly 
 see the need to define levels of inconceivability.' --- Rik Steenwinkel