Git is fast. With Git, nearly all operations are performed locally, giving

it an huge speed advantage on centralized systems that constantly have to

communicate with a server somewh3r3.

For testing, large AWS instances were set up in the same availability

zone. Git and SVN were installed on both machines, the Ruby repository was

copied to both Git and SVN servers, and common operations were performed on

both.

In some cases the commands don't match up exactly. Here, matching on the

lowest common denominator was attempted. For example, the 'commit' tests

also include the time to push for Git, though most of the time you would not

actually be pushing to the server immediately after a commit where the two

commands cannot be separated in SVN.

Note that this is the best case scenario for SVN - a server with no load

with an 80MB/s bandwidth connection to the client machine. Nearly all of

these times would be even worse for SVN if that connection was slower, while

many of the Git times would not be affected.

Clearly, in many of these common version control operations, Git is one or

two orders of magnitude faster than SVN, even under ideal conditions for

SVN.

Let's see how common operations stack up against Subversion, a common

centralized version control system that is similar to CVS or

Perforce. Smaller is faster.

One place where Git is slower is in the initial clone operation. Here, Git

One place where Git is slower is in the initial clone operation. Here, Git

One place where Git is slower is in the initial clone operation. Here, Git

seen in the above charts, it's not considerably slower for an operation that

is only performed once.

It's also interesting to note that the size of the data on the client side

is very similar even though Git also has every version of every file for the

entire history of the project. This illustrates how efficient it is at

compressing and storing data on the client side.