[6LLvveMx2koXfwn]

They weren't, if you look at the fix [1] the dedupe loop was run in all cases, not just those with known dupes, so the performance hit was any bundle with lots of refs.

1.https://github.com/git/git/commit/bb74c0abbc31da35be52999569...

[rjmunro]

But why couldn't they just dedupe the refs from the command line before starting the actual bundling - surely there are never more than a couple of hundred of those (one per branch)?

[6LLvveMx2koXfwn]

The point is the performance hit had nothing to do with dupe count (which could be zero), and everything to do with ref count.

[nayak]

Spot on. Some of our repositories at GitLab can contain millions of references.