On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 11:18:20AM -0400, Morten Welinder wrote:At this level of performance I would say it doesn't matter. If a full checkin take two minutes or three minutes doesn't concern me, because I'm not going to sit and watch it, I'm going to read LKML or write my beer blog in another window. I would care about two vs. three hours, but minutes are too long to wait and too short to care.
I had three design goals. "disk space" wasn't one of them
And, if at some point it should become an issue, it's fixable. Since
access to objects is fairly centralized and since they are
immutable, it would be quite simple to move an arbitrary selection
of the objects into some other storage form which could take
similarities between objects into account.
This is not a fix, this is a band-aid. A fix is fitting all the data
in 10 times less space without sacrificing too much performance.
So disk space and its cousin number-of-files are both when-and-if
problems. And not scary ones at that.
But its sibling bandwidth _is_ a problem. The delta between 2.6.10 and
2.6.11 in git terms will be much larger than a _full kernel tarball_.
Simply checking in patch-2.6.11 on top of 2.6.10 as a single changeset
takes 41M. Break that into a thousand overlapping deltas (ie the way
it is actually done) and it will be much larger.