I've spent all week working on performance. It started when Lukey found a way to use git cat-file --buffer to make --all faster. Once implemented, that turned out to be a 2x to 16x speedup in seek time.

I felt that same approach could probably also speed up other parts of git-annex that use git cat-file, so spent another 4 days finding ways to do that. Some of the ideas are not implemented yet, but I landed a 2x speedup today, to all git-annex commands that seek annexed files to work on.

Oh and also there used to be a git-annex branch read cache, but it got removed many years ago, and I forgot it had been removed. Which does not lead to writing the fastest code. Bringing the cache back makes some things another 20% faster.

---

This work was sponsored by Mark Reidenbach, Jake Vosloo, and Graham Spencer on Patreon.