git-annex-filter-process - Man Page

git annex filter-process

When this is not enabled, each file that git wants to filter involves starting up a new git-annex smudge process. Starting many such processes for many files can be slow, and can make commands like git checkout and git add slow when they are operating on a lot of files. (A lot of locked annexed files do not make git checkout slow, but unlocked files and non-annexed files do slow it down.)

On the other hand when this is enabled, git add of a large file does an unnecessary extra read of the file, and pipes its contents into git-annex. So when this is enabled, it will be faster to use git-annex add to add large files to the annex, rather than git add. Other commands that add files, like git commit -a, are also impacted by this.

This is used by default in git-annex repositories v9 and above, while v8 repositories use git-annex smudge for backwards compatability with older versions of git-annex.

To enable this in a v8 repository, run:

git config filter.annex.process 'git-annex filter-process'

To disable it, you can just unset the config:

git config --unset filter.annex.process

There will be no visible difference in behavior between enabling this and not, besides changes in speed and memory use when using git.

The git-annex-common-options(1) can be used.

git-annex(1) git-annex-smudge(1)

Joey Hess <id@joeyh.name>

git-annex(1), git-annex-smudge(1).