📢 Git 2.31 features background maintenance, on-disk reverse indexes

Git 2.31.0 introduces a new service called "background maintenance". This cross-platform feature will allow Git to keep your repository healthy without blocking your interactions with Git. As a result, it will improve the file fetching time by pre-fetching the latest objects from the remote repository. The project team said that this activity will automatically trigger once an hour.

To get started with the background maintenance, just open your terminal and navigate to your repository where you want to enable the background maintenance feature. Then run the command $ git maintenance start in the terminal window.

Apart from pre-fetching the objects from the remote repository once an hour, Git will also make sure that its own data still remains well organized. It will update its commit-graph file once an hour, and pack any loose objects nightly.

Git puts the objects into pack files, which are generally a concatenated stream of objects. Earlier, there was no on-disk format for reverse indexes. As a result, Git had to generate and store the reverse indexes in memory.

This causes an additional burden to complete the process each time. When there is a repository with large pack files, it takes a lot of time to complete the loading process of reverse indexes.

With Git 2.31.0, it gained the ability to serialize the reverse indexes into a new file with the .rev extension. Once it generates the on-disk reverse index file, your fetch or push runs faster as the reverse index has been already computed.

Do note that the .rev file doesn't generate automatically by Git. You have to turn the feature on by running the command: git config pack.writeReverseIndex true, and then repacking your repository by the command git repack -A -d.