Git Has A New Wire Protocol Yielding Much Greater Performance

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 18 May 2018 at 01:37 PM EDT. 19 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
The Git Protocol Version 2 was announced today by Google as a major update to the distributed revision control system's wire protocol. Git protocol version 2 is much more efficient and yields significant performance benefits.

The new Git wire protocol offers server-side filtering for references, easy extensibility for new features, and simplified client handling of the HTTP transport.

Google is already using the new version of the Git protocol internally to great speed-ups. Brandon Williams of Google's Git team explained, "a performance improvement of 3x for no-op fetches of a single branch on repositories containing 500k references. Protocol v2 has also enabled a reduction of 8x of the overhead bytes (non-packfile) sent from googlesource.com servers. A majority of this improvement is due to filtering references advertised by the server to the refs the client has expressed interest in."

The Git protocol-v2 work was merged less than two weeks ago to mainline ahead of the Git 2.18 release. With the significant benefits, Google is already supporting this new protocol on their Git servers at Google Source and Cloud Source Repositories.

More details via the Google Open-Source Blog.
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