[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.