I routinely experience very poor behaviour of the auto garbage collection both on the command line and especially with git gui (which appears to have a much lower threashold). I have a kernel git repository I do most of my work in which includes a bunch of trees including -next and which has some frequently rebased branches. This does garbage collection (or for git gui prompts me to do garbage collection) far too frequently. Previous analysis has shown that the issue is that garbage collection leaves a bunch of unreferenced items lying around as loose objects rather than in a pack waiting to age out of the tree. This is especially bad towards the end of the release cycle when the trees in -next get bigger, right now the gc *always* triggers.
It seems to me that it should be possible to trigger garbage collection based on proportions of the number of objects in the repository rather than on absolute numbers; some sort of time/object count increase based holdoff might be useful to prevent things retriggering too soon.
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