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  • #2861
Closed
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Issue created Nov 10, 2016 by John Smith@chreste

Cloning a repository with many files tracked by git-lfs is extremely slow

What steps will reproduce the problem?

  1. Install git-lfs
  2. Create a repository with a few thousand files tracked by git-lfs. My repository has a lot of small (5KB-1MB) image files.
  3. Clone the repository using TortoiseGit

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?

I expect the clone to be fast because git-lfs has a built-in command called "git lfs clone" that eliminates the overhead of downloading large files one at a time. Instead, I see that files are downloaded one at a time which is extremely slow on Windows (1-2 seconds per file).

What version of TortoiseGit and Git are you using? On what operating system?

TortoiseGit 2.3.0.0

Git 2.9.0

git-lfs 1.4.4

Windows 7

Please provide any additional information below.

There are some workarounds. One workaround is to completely disable git-lfs before cloning (git lfs install --skip-smudge) so that TortoiseGit ignores files tracked by git-lfs during the clone operation. After the clone finishes, I have to manually run git lfs pull in the cloned repository and then re-enable git lfs using git lfs install --force.

Another workaround is to run this command from Git Bash: git lfs clone <url> <directory>

To upload designs, you'll need to enable LFS and have an admin enable hashed storage. More information
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