Jonathan Tan authored Oct 09, 2018 and Junio C Hamano committed Oct 10, 2018

In a partial clone, whenever a sparse checkout occurs, the existence of
all blobs in the index is verified, whether they are included or
excluded by the .git/info/sparse-checkout specification. This
significantly degrades performance because a lazy fetch occurs whenever
the existence of a missing blob is checked.

This is because cache_tree_update() checks the existence of all objects
in the index, whether or not CE_SKIP_WORKTREE is set on them. Teach
cache_tree_update() to skip checking CE_SKIP_WORKTREE objects when the
repository is a partial clone. This improves performance for sparse
checkout and also other operations that use cache_tree_update().

Instead of completely removing the check, an argument could be made that
the check should instead be replaced by a check that the blob is
promised, but for performance reasons, I decided not to do this.
If the user needs to verify the repository, it can be done using fsck
(which will notify if a tree points to a missing and non-promised blob,
whether the blob is included or excluded by the sparse-checkout
specification).

Signed-off-by: Jonathan Tan <jonathantanmy@google.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>