Clone for large LFS project very slow on windows

Question

Cloning a large repository with ~4gb of LFS files is incredibly slow on windows (sourcetree 2.3.5). There are ~10k files, being pulled from a central repo on the network.

If I perform `git lfs fetch` from the command line or do a clone in OSX sourcetree it gathers all LFS files in about 10-15 minutes. In comparison souretree on windows took 25 minutes to just get to 15% of files (an order of magnitude slower). Also looking at the output it seems like osx is doing a `git lfs fetch` in the background (can see a summary printed in the command line), whilst windows seems to be doing an operation on every single file. (every single file spawns and logs an entry in the progress window). My understanding is that sourcetree should skip filter smudge when it clones, but it seems this might not be the case on windows?

From the progress window in sourcetree for windows:

git -c filter.lfs.smudge= -c filter.lfs.required=false -c diff.mnemonicprefix=false -c core.quotepath=false clone --branch master ...

Not quite sure how to interpret if this is correct

minnsey · Answer

Hello @Mahesh Khambadkone

I'm afraid I'm no longer a member of the Sourcetree development team, as such I'm unable to answer the question, sorry.

Mahesh Khambadkone · Answer

Hi @minnsey , Curious if this was ever resolved ? I have been using a Mac for the past 5 years with Sourcetree, and clones of a 2GB repository would take upto 15 minutes.

I've had to use a Windows of late, and the clone is endless ; with antivirus disabled, the same repsitory is already cloning over 2 hours.  Lots of lines of "Filtering content: xxx% " indicating it's fetching the lfs content.  But this is unusually long ; both systems are on the same network.

Are there any suggestions you may have as to what can cause this slowdown?

minnsey · Answer

Thanks for the additional information>

Can you post the console window output?

I'm not completely clear how you feel it is different. Sourcetree just issues a single clone command, although the output does include a file by file output.