Most of git-annex is designed to be fast no matter how many other files are in the annex. Things like add/get/drop/move/fsck have good locality; they will only operate on as many files as you need them to.

(git commit can get a little slow with a great deal of files, but that's out of scope -- and recent git-annex versions use queuing to save git add from piling up too much in the index.)

But currently two git-annex commands are quite slow when annexes become large in quantity of files. These are unused and status. (Both have --fast versions that don't do as much).

(Update: status has become acceptably fast; most of its slowdown was due to using a bad data structure; scanning the tree is not particularly slow and it no longer looks at the git-annex branch.)

unused is slow because it needs two pieces of information that are not quick to look up, and require examining the whole repo, very seekily:

1. The keys present in the annex. Found by looking thru .git/annex/objects
2. The keys referenced by files in git. Found by finding every file in git, and looking at its symlink.

Of these, the first is less expensive (typically, an annex does not have every key in it). It could be optimized fairly simply, by adding a database of keys present in the annex that is optimised to list them all. The database would be updated by the few functions that move content in and out.

The second is harder to optimise, because the user can delete, revert, copy, add, etc files in git at will, and git-annex does not have a good way to watch that and maintain a database of what keys are being referenced.

It could use a post-commit hook and examine files changed by commits, etc. But then staged files would be left out. It might be sufficient to make --fast trust the database... except unused will suggest deleting data if nothing references it. Or maybe it could be required to have a clean tree with nothing staged before running git-annex unused.

Anyway, this is a semi-longterm item for me. --Joey

Update: It seems like #2 has been accomplished now, the keys database tracks associated files in all cases now. Although with the caveat that there can be stale information sometimes, so it might still not be useful for these purposes. --Joey