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[ #209 ] Speed of git clone Permalink
Git clone is fast locally because it uses hardlinks.
If you compare it to a:
$ mkdir repo && cd repo
$ git init
$ git remote add origin /path/to/local/repo
$ git pull origin master
... then you will see how much faster the hardlinks make it. On a repo of about 600MB checked out, the git clone will finish in < 5 seconds while the init/remote/pull will finish in ~ 1.5 mins. You can make the init/remote/pull use hardlinks by supplying an alternates file, and this will take the operation down to the same time as a git clone.
If the reason for replacing a git clone with the complex steps above does not seem obvious to you, ... I don't blame you. I'm doing some complex wrappers of git that intercept certain commands and locally cache all downloaded repos then fetch from that instead of going over the network all the time. So... don't worry about it :-)
Colophon
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