Git show "hangs" due to large content in commit diff

[Mark Waite]

I've seen cases where my Jenkins master server has a painfully long running git process (running for a day or more, using 98% of a CPU, hundreds of megabytes of memory, etc.).  That git process is owned by the jenkins user and seems to be launched by the git plugin.

If I execute the same command from the command line, I get the same results, a long running git process that uses CPU time as long as I'll let it run.

I think the root of the problem is a mistake I made in the git repository.  I mistakenly added large binaries to the Git repository (50 MB+ of Microsoft SQL Server Express in my example) and when git show attempts to "show" that much content, it takes a very long time.  I suspect that if I wait long enough, it will eventually return.

I'm a selfish user, and I'd like to not suffer for my mistakes.  Is there a way to avoid the call to "git show" from the Git plugin?  I'll certainly investigate in the plugin source code, but before I start that investigation I thought it was safest to ask the mailing list in case others have encountered a similar problem and found a simple solution.

Thanks,

Mark Waite

[Mark Waite]

I submitted a pull request to the git plugin to resolve this issue.  I did not log a bug because at some level a performance issue may not be considered a bug, especially when the performance issue seems to be with git rather than with Jenkins use of git.

See https://github.com/jenkinsci/git-plugin/pull/122

Thanks!

Mark Waite