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authorGravatar Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>2012-02-14 18:50:25 -0400
committerGravatar Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net>2012-02-14 18:50:25 -0400
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tree5963d3d59f28ceba36ac604638e23ee9b935c94c /doc/scalability.mdwn
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+git-annex is designed for scalability. The key points are:
+
+* Arbitrarily large files can be managed. The only constraint
+ on file size are how large a file your filesystem can hold.
+
+ While git-annex does checksum files by default, there
+ is a [[WORM_backend|backends]] available that avoids the checksumming
+ overhead, so you can add new, enormous files, very fast. This also
+ allows it to be used on systems with very slow disk IO.
+
+* Memory usage should be constant. This is a "should", because there
+ can sometimes be leaks (and this is one of haskell's weak spots),
+ but git-annex is designed so that it does not need to hold all
+ the details about your repository in memory.
+
+ The one exception is that [[todo/git-annex_unused_eats_memory]],
+ because it *does* need to hold the whole repo state in memory. But
+ that is still considered a bug, and hoped to be solved one day.
+ Luckily, that command is not often used.
+
+* Many files can be managed. The limiting factor is git's own
+ limitations in scaling to repositories with a lot of files, and as git
+ improves this will improve. Scaling to hundreds of thousands of files
+ is not a problem, scaling beyond that and git will start to get slow.
+
+ To some degree, git-annex works around innefficiencies in git; for
+ example it batches input sent to certian git commands that are slow
+ when run in an emormous repository.
+
+* It can use as much, or as little bandwidth as is available. In
+ particular, any interrupted file transfer can be resumed by git-annex.