Re: Magit slow on Windows

["Óscar Fuentes" <ofv@wanadoo.es>]

Richard Riley <rileyrg@gmail.com> writes:

>> But I'm not sure this will solve your problem.  The Windows filesystem
>> is slower than Linux filesystems, especially with a cold cache, and
>> nothing, not even Emacs, can change that.
>
> Not in anyway that would cause any human recognisable delay.  Suggesting
> that speed of the file system is in any way contributing to this issue
> is somewhat silly and misleading and introducing fud.

git is heavily optimized for GNU/Linux. It exploits the APIs and use
cases that performs better there. Msysgit is not optimized for
MS-Windows and, on addition, MSYS/Cygwin, which git depends on,
introduces an intermediate layer that slows down certain operations
quite a bit.

So it is not that NTFS is slower than ext4/whatever for all relevant use
cases, but that git is fine-tuned for the GNU/Linux filesystems. Plus,
creating processes is much slower on Windows than on GNU/Linux (that's
an undeniable fact.) As magit runs several commands for several
often-used operations, that makes a big difference.

Last but not least, there are problems with certain configurations that
dramatically slows down git on Windows7/Vista. Take a look at the
msysgit bug tracker for details.