Why is Sourcetree so much slower than the ugly built in Git tools?

[Kyle Cordes]

SourceTree's git history view looks very nice. It contains approximately the same information as is shown by Git's included "gitk" tools, but it is much slower to update when presented with a long/complex history. Is this something inherent in how Sourcetree works? Or should it improve with future versions?

[Deleted user]

Simple solution for me (Win7 x64): Run it as administrator!

[Chris Cinelli]

I am on Mac. Latest 1.6.2.2

[KieranA]

There can be various reasons for SourceTree to go slow. If you've got a lot of untracked files, if your repository is on an external disk, if you've got small system resources or perhaps if you're using a system Git version that's older. Do you fall under any of these categories?

[Chris Cinelli]

Mine get almost unusable. Our repo has a lot of commits but I am not so sure that is the problem.
I also have a few file not checked in in GIT, a few stashes and 15 braches.

[KieranA]

Hi Chris? Could you let us know which version you're using? The latest is 1.0.7 on Windows.

[mything]

Steve you just check out default vissual stduio MFC project.

It's so slow that we can not use this to look out some differnent changes.

It's absured that it needs time 1sec for 1 file check.

[Kyle Cordes]

I don't have time to pursue a good example now; I assume someone else will find a severe case that results in a bug report and fix. I'm not using SourceTree on huge projects yet, so a good workaround for now is to sip a beverage while waiting for the working copy status or history diagram to update.

[Kyle Cordes]

I will look for an example in a public repo that shows the difference. In the (private repo) example in front of me, a repo with a couple hundred commits on Windows, SourceTree takes a few seconds to refresh the the history while gitk --all takes a fraction of a second. Of course I'm comparing to "gitk --all" which offers content very close to what source tree shows, including all branches and uncomitted changes. The SourceTree screen is much prettier of course.

[Matthew Hopkins]

delete me

[stevestreeting]

For the record, I don't find SourceTree much slower than Gitk (at least on refresh once the app is loaded - the startup does tend to be a little slower). SourceTree does show you a lot more than gitk; you can get closer to the same amount of data by switching to 'Current Branch' in SourceTree (since that's all that Gitk displays), and not having any Bookmarks, although then you still have the sidebar and summaries - SourceTree shows you the log and the state of the working dir in one go for example. We're always trying to optimise, so if you have an example of a case which is especially slower, please provide us with a clone link we can use to test with.