Git Bash is extremely slow on Windows 7 x64

Question

I ve been using Git on both Windows and Ubuntu during the development of a small project  frequently flipping back and forth between the two  The issue is that Git Bash consistently becomes slow   When I say slow  I mean that running cd takes anywhere from 8-25 seconds  running git commands take from 5-20 seconds  and ls can take up to 30 seconds sometimes  Needless to say  this is not fun  not to mention unproductive  I know Git is slower on Windows  but this is ridiculous   The one solution which has worked--temporarily--for me has been to disable my network connection  as suggested in this answer   start Git Bash  and then reconnect  Sometimes it continues to run quickly for days after doing that  but the performance always degrades eventually  I ve trawled through the msysgit discussion group  Stack nbsp Overflow  msysgit issue list  etc  on and off for weeks  but I haven t been able to turn up solutions which work   So far  I ve tried    Adding Git  amp  project folders to the virus scanner s exclusion list Disabling my virus scanner completely  Kaspersky IS 2011  Ensuring that Outlook is not running  Outlook 2007  Shutting down all other applications Running Git Bash as administrator Disabling network connection  starting Git Bash  and keeping connection disabled Disabling network connection  starting Git Bash  re-enabling connection  works only occasionally  Running git gc And combinations of the above   I did read that a couple of people had success disabling Bash completion  but ideally I d like to keep that active  The version of msysgit is 1 7 3 1-preview20101002  amp  the OS is Windows 7 x64  Running the same things on Linux is  predictably  lightning fast  I would use Linux exclusively  but I need to run stuff in Windows  too  certain applications  testing  etc     Has anyone encountered a similar issue  If so  what was the underlying problem and what was the solution  if any    This extends beyond just the Git repositories  but just for reference  the repositories I ve been using Git with have been pretty small   4-50 files maximum

User · Answer

While your problem might be network-based, I've personally sped up my local git status calls tenfold (7+ seconds down to 700 ms) by doing two modifications. This is on a 700 MB repository with 21,000 files and excessive numbers of large binary files.

One is enabling parallel index preloads. From a command prompt:

git config core.preloadindex true
This changed time git status from 7 seconds to 2.5 seconds.

Update!

The following is no longer necessary. A patch has fixed this as of mysysgit 1.9.4
https://github.com/msysgit/git/commit/64d63240762df22e92b287b145d75a0d68a66988
However, you must enable the fix by typing
git config core.fscache true

I also disabled the UAC and the "luafv" driver (reboot required). This disables a driver in Windows Vista, 7 and 8 that redirects programs trying to write to system locations and instead redirects those accesses to a user directory.

To see a discussion on how this affects Git performance, read here: https://code.google.com/p/msysgit/issues/detail?id=320

To disable this driver, in regedit, change the "start" key at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SYSTEM/CurrentControlSet/Services/luafv to 4 to disable the driver. Then, put UAC to its lowest setting, "never notify".

If the disabling of this driver makes you wary (it should), an alternative is running on a drive (or partition) different than your system partition. Apparently the driver only runs on file access on the system partition. I have a second hard drive and see identical results when run with this registry modification on my C drive as I do without it on the D drive.

This change takes time git status from 2.5 seconds down to 0.7 seconds.

You also might want to follow https://github.com/msysgit/git/pull/94 and https://github.com/git/git/commit/d637d1b9a8fb765a8542e69bd2e04b3e229f663b to check out what additional work is underway for speed issues in Windows.

User · Answer

Combined answers    Wilbert s - what info to include in PS1 sinelaw s -   lt branch name gt   or   lt sha gt       https   unix stackexchange com questions 140610 using-variables-to-store-terminal-color-codes-for-ps1 140618 140618   https   unix stackexchange com questions 124407 what-color-codes-can-i-use-in-my-ps1-prompt    033 is the same as  e   0 32 is the same as 32 CYAN    echo -e   e 1 36m    GREEN    echo -e   e 32m    YELLOW    echo -e   e 33m    RESET    echo -e   e 0m       https   stackoverflow com questions 4485059 git-bash-is-extremely-slow-in-windows-7-x64 19500237 19500237   https   stackoverflow com questions 4485059 git-bash-is-extremely-slow-in-windows-7-x64 13476961 13476961   https   stackoverflow com questions 39518124 check-if-directory-is-git-repository-without-having-to-cd-into-it 39518382 39518382 fast git ps1          git -C   rev-parse 2 gt  dev null  amp  amp  echo       git symbolic-ref --short -q HEAD    git rev-parse -q --short HEAD  2 gt   dev null         you need    at the end for colors   Don t set    at the beginning or ctrl up for history will work strangely PS1    GREEN  u  h   YELLOW  w  CYAN   fast git ps1   RESET          Result

User · Answer

I ve encountered the same problem running Git for Windows  msysgit  on Windows 7 x64 as a limited user account for quite some time   From what I ve read here and other places  the common theme seems to be the lack of administrative privileges and or UAC  Since UAC is off on my system  the explanation that it is trying to write delete something in the program files directory makes the most sense to me   In any case  I ve resolved my problem by installing the portable version of Git 1 8 with zipinstaller  Note that I had to unpack the  7z distribution file and repack it as a ZIP file in order for zipinstaller to work  I also had to manually add that directory to my system path   The performance is fine now  Even though it is installed in the Program Files  x86  directory  which I don t have permissions for as a limited user  it doesn t seem to suffer from the same problem   I ascribe this either to the fact that the portable version is a bit more conservative in where it writes deletes files  which is probably the case  or to the upgrade from 1 7 to 1 8  I m not going to try to pin down which one is the reason  suffice to say it works much better now  including Bash

User · Answer

It appears that completely uninstalling Git  restarting  the classic Windows cure   and reinstalling Git was the cure   I also wiped out all bash config files which were left over  they were manually created    Everything is fast again   If for some reason reinstalling isn t possible  or desirable   then I would definitely try changing the PS1 variable referenced in Chris Dolan s answer  it resulted in significant speedups in certain operations

User · Answer

Nothing of the above was able to help me  In my scenario the issue was showing itself like this    Any ll command was slow  was taking about 3 seconds to execute  Any subsequent ll command was executed instantly  but only if within 45 seconds from the previous ls command    When it came to debugging with Process Monitor it was found that before every command there was a DNS request   So as soon as I disabled my firewall  Comodo in my case  and let the command execute the issue is gone  And it is not returning back when the firewall was switched back on  With the earliest opportunity I ll update this response with more details about what process was doing a blocking DNS request and what was the target   BR G

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You might also gain a very subsquent performance boost by changing the following Git configuration   git config --global status submoduleSummary false   When running the simple git status command on Window 7 x64  it took my computer more than 30 seconds to run  After this option was defined  the command is immediate   Activating Git s own tracing as explained in the following page helped me found the origin of the problem  which might differ in your installation  https   github com msysgit msysgit wiki Diagnosing-why-Git-is-so-slow

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In my case  it actually was Avast antivirus leading to Git Bash and even PowerShell becoming really slow   I first tried disabling Avast for 10 minutes to see if it improved the speed and it did  Afterwards  I added the entire Git Bash installation directory as an exception in Avast  for Read  Write and Execute  In my case that was C  Program Files Git

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In an extension to Chris Dolan s answer  I used the following alternative PS1 setting  Simply add the code fragment to your    profile  on Windows nbsp 7  C  Users USERNAME  profile    fast git ps1          printf --    git branch 2 gt  dev null   sed -ne         s               1    p       PS1     033 0  MSYSTEM  w 007  033 32m   u  h    033 33m w  fast git ps1  033 0m         This retains the benefit of a colored shell and display of the current branch name  if in a Git repository   but it is significantly faster on my machine  from  0 75 s to 0 1 s   This is based on this blog post

User · Answer

A co-worker of mine had troubles with Git on Windows  7  git status checkout and add were fast  but git commit took ages   We are still trying to find the root cause of this  but cloning the repository into a new folder fixed his problem

User · Answer

In addition to these other answers  I ve sped up projects with multiple submodules by using parallel submodule fetching  since Git 2 8 in early 2016    This can be done with git fetch --recurse-submodules -j8 and set with git config --global submodule fetchJobs 8  or however many cores you have want to use

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You can significantly speed up Git on Windows by running three commands to set some config options   git config --global core preloadindex true git config --global core fscache true git config --global gc auto 256   Notes    core preloadindex does filesystem operations in parallel to hide latency  update  enabled by default in Git 2 1  core fscache fixes UAC issues so you don t need to run Git as administrator  update  enabled by default in Git for Windows 2 8  gc auto minimizes the number of files in  git

User · Answer

I was having the same problem  in both Git Bash and Git GUI  Both programs use to run nicely  but then they randomly slowed down to a crawl  and I couldn t figure out why   As it turns out  it was Avast  Avast has caused odd things to happen to various programs  including programs I write   so I disabled it for a second  and sure enough  Bash now runs as fast as it does on Linux  I just added the Git program files folder  C  Program Files Git  to the Avast exclusion list  and now it runs as fast as it does on Linux   And yes  I realize the antivirus software was not the issue in the original post  but I ll just put this here in case it s useful to someone

User · Answer

As noted in Chris Dolan s and Wilbert s answers  PS1 slows you down   Rather than completely disabling  as suggested by Dolan  or using the script offered by Wilbert  I use a  dumb PS1  that is much faster   It uses  git symbolic-ref -q HEAD    git rev-parse --short HEAD  2 gt   dev null   PS1   033 33m   w  n   033 32m     git symbolic-ref -q HEAD    git rev-parse -q --short HEAD  2 gt   dev null     033 00m        On my Cygwin  this is faster than Wilbert s  fast Git PS1  answer - 200 ms vs  400 ms  so it shaves off a bit of your prompt sluggishness   It isn t as sophisticated as   git ps1 - for example it doesn t change the prompt when you cd into the  git directory  etc  but for normal everyday use it s good enough and fast   This was tested on Git 1 7 9  Cygwin  but it should work on any platform

User · Answer

I saw a decent improvement by setting core preloadindex to true as recommended here

User · Answer

I found the network drive was the performance problem  HOME was pointing to a slow network share  I could not override HOMEDRIVE but that is not a problem from what I have seen   Set the environment variable by right clicking  your computer on the desktop --  properties --  Advanced system settings --  Environment Variables Add to User variables section  HOME  USERPROFILE

User · Answer

I solved my slow Git problem on Windows 7 x64 by starting cmd exe with  Run as administrator

User · Answer

I also had issue with git PS1 slowness  although for a long time I was thinking it s a database size problem  big repository  and was trying various git gc tricks  and were looking for other reasons  just like you  However  in my case  the problem was this line   function ps1 gitify      status   git status 2 gt  dev null           lt --------------------    if     status     fatal  Not a git repository        then        echo       else        echo    ps1 git branch name     ps1 git get sha     fi     Doing the git status for every command line status line was slow  Ouch  It was something I wrote by hand  I saw that was a problem when I tried the  export PS1       like mentioned in one answer here  The command line was lightning fast   Now I m using this   function we are in git work tree       git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree  amp  gt   dev null    function ps1 gitify       if   we are in git work tree     then           From the Stack nbsp Overflow post PS1 line with git current branch and colors and it works fine  Again have a fast Git command line

User · Answer

Do you have Git information showing in your Bash prompt   If so  maybe you re inadvertently doing way too much work on every command   To test this theory try the following temporary change in Bash   export PS1

User · Answer

My Windows home directory is on the network  and I suspected that Git Bash commands were looking there first   Sure enough  when I looked at  PATH  it listed  h bin first  where  h is a share on a Windows file server  even though  h bin doesn t exist  I edited  etc profile and commented out the export command that puts it first in  PATH    export PATH   HOME bin  PATH    This made my commands run much faster  probably because Git Bash is no longer looking across the network for the executables   My  etc profile was c  Program Files  x86  Git etc profile

User · Answer

As many said  this is due to stash being a shell script on Windows  but since Git 2 18 0 the Windows installer has an option for an experimental feature of a much faster   90   built-in version of stash - https   github com git-for-windows build-extra pull 203

User · Answer

In my case  the Git Bash shortcut was set to Start in  HOMEDRIVE  HOMEPATH   you can check this by right clicking Git Bash and selecting properties   This was the network drive    The solution is to make it point to  HOME   If you do not have it  you can set it up in the environment variables and now Git Bash should be lightning fast

User · Answer

I ve had similar situation and my problem was related to Active Directory and sitting behind vpn  Found this gold after working like that for half a year  http   bjg io guide cygwin-ad  All you basicaly need is to disable db in  etc nsswitch conf  you can find it in your git directory  from passwd and group section  so the file looks like    Begin  etc nsswitch conf passwd  files group  files db enum  cache builtin db home  cygwin desc db shell  cygwin desc db gecos  cygwin desc   End  etc nsswitch conf  and then update your local password and group settings once    mkpasswd -l -c  gt   etc passwd   mkgroup -l -c  gt   etc group

User · Answer

Only turning off AMD Radeon Graphics  or Intel Graphics  in Device Manager helped me     I found the answer here   https   superuser com questions 1160349 git-is-extremely-slow-on-windows

User · Answer

If you use Git from cmd  try running it from Git Bash  In cmd  git exe is actually a wrapper that sets up the correct environment every time you start it  and only then launches the real git exe  It can take up to twice as much time as it s required to just do what you want  And Git Bash sets up the environment only when it starts

[git] Git Bash is extremely slow on Windows 7 x64

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