At my company we are a very happy customers of JIRA. Recently I've been trying to pin down the best git GUI out there. I came across SourceTree and naturally, it being an Atlassian product, I gave it a shot.
I think it works great. It's very powerful and seems to have everything I need in a git GUI. I'm very pleased to have found one that is more user-friendly than Tower, and much more powerful than GitHub for Mac (which I'd been using previously).
However, increasingly as I get more experience with the software, I notice that it really bogs down my entire system for a number of its operations. In particular, refreshing the commit log and pulling from the remote tend to take seconds to complete - sometimes many seconds - and often during that time my MacBook Pro is almost completely out of service. My wireless trackpad's cursor becomes so jerky I can't really control it, and all other applications practically grind to a halt. My CPU fan goes on real high, too.
Being a programmer myself I am mystified as to why SourceTree is performing such CPU-intensive operations, and taking processing priority over all other processes (including the processing of my Bluetooth trackpad, it seems). In addition, I never notice any behaviour even remotely like this when using git from the command line - it's very fast and quite relaxed. Why should the GUI be so different in behaviour? What is so important that I'm prohibited from continuing my conversation on Skype or writing my e-mail until it completes?
Tower actually exhibits similar behaviour, which makes me wonder if this behaviour is intrinsic to git GUIs! However, SourceTree wins as far as duration of the OS slowdown goes, and unfortunately it really hampers the user experience to a point where I have to consider an alternative.
I hope someone can shed some light on this problem.
Thanks very much to Atlassian for an otherwise great product.
Paul
