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by nsteel 1032 days ago
> Because they want to support Git for Windows which is built upon Cygwin/msys

I read that, but I was wondering why they wanted that because they don't say. I've never noticed git to be slow under WSL but I guess that very much depends on your repo size and exactly what you are doing. It all sounds like a tremendous amount of hassle otherwise.

I agree, Cygwin did enable us to work productively for many years. But Cygwin's drive mounting modes caused lots of pain. And the Xserver is simply awful. It is/was a constant source of issues, the worst being the incredibly frustrating crashes. Maybe they were due to underlying issues in the applications themselves but those apps work fine under WSLg (of course there are other bugs but we can still work with those).
1 comments
camtarn 1032 days ago
Git is very slow under WSL2 when working with our medium-sized repos hosted on Windows filesystems (required by our Windows-only tooling). It's not unusable, but 'git status' under WSL1 was almost instant, whereas it takes a good few seconds under WSL2.
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lathiat 1032 days ago
It’s due to what is effectively a network file system. You have the same issue with nfs, 9pfs, parallels prl_fs, etc. It has to stat every file in the repo and that gets expensive on ang RPC protocol. Even local ones apparently.

This is made worse because git uses the os-specific file statistics including inode number to track file changes. These change over most such file systems types which triggers it to rebuild the entire file cache every time you switch OS running git commands. Which if you have shell integration is constantly.

I share my git repos between MacOS and a Linux volume and it hurts on any repo with 100s of thousands of files or more. Ceph, Linux kernel, etc.

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nsteel 1032 days ago
Turns out you guys are right. I tried a bigger repo and it was slow. I tried our large monorepo and it was utterly unusable (literally minutes for git status).

I've found this thorough explanation https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197#issuecomment-60...

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verall 1032 days ago
I have git for windows installed and then alias git=git.exe so git from WSL just calls windows git which is much faster and I've never noticed any issues with this.

I also use WSL1 though so maybe my setup is weird.

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nsteel 1032 days ago
The github link I posted elsewhere explains why WSL1 is far more performant, most don't need that hack in the WSL1 case (but doesn't hurt).
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