>
> Can you do
>
>         strace -o tracefile -Ttt git show-ref
>
> and send out the tracefile?
>

Sure. File ran against git tree attached.

> What I _suspect_ is going on is that when you packed your refs, you either
> didn't prune them (which means that packing didn't actually help you), or
> if you did prune them, since we don't seem to remove the refs
> _directories_ when packing, you still have an old and big directory for
> .git/refs/tags, and just reading that (empty, but non-shrunken) directory
> takes time.

Indeed it is not empty, it has 4 refs, all the remaining are in packed-refs:

$ ls .git/refs/tags
v1.4.3.4  v1.4.3.5  v1.4.4  v1.4.4-rc1  v1.4.4-rc2

$ ls -l .git/packed-refs
-rw-r--r-- 1 marco marco 6469 nov  3 21:03 .git/packed-refs

$ cat .git/packed-refs  |wc
    109     218    6469

If you want I can repack and prune, but for now I just wait to avoid
to corrupt this test case.

IMHO if just 4 entry in a directory out of 109 could slow down in this
way, at least should be documented/warned in some place. Also because
this it seems to me, perhaps wrongly, a quite common scenario of an
user that repacks the tags seldom.


    Marco