Why Perforce is more scalable than Git

Re:Why Perforce is more scalable than Git by silentbicycle on Sunday March 15, 2009 @10:00AM (#516826)

Git IS a key/value store database. (A filesystem is a kind of database, too, of course.) There's a good summary of the internal data structures here -- http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual....

As I've said elsewhere in this thread, tracking metadata (path and sha1 hash) for large binary files in git and otherwise ignoring them via .gitignore works quite well. I'm pretty sure the "right tool" is either rysnc or something similar.

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Re:Why Perforce is more scalable than Git by twopoint718 on Sunday March 15, 2009 @12:37PM (#516939)

You know, that got me thinking. ZFS will do versioning and, as a filesystem, you'd be keeping your binary data in it anyway. In ZFS, this versioning is implemented as a tree of data blocks, only those blocks that change between versions would be "new". If a block is unchanged, ZFS can exploit shared structure to avoid needless copying.

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Re:Why Perforce is more scalable than Git by silentbicycle on Sunday March 15, 2009 @12:52PM (#516950)

Right. You can do a lot of things (version control and encryption come to mind) at the filesystem level. A filesystem is a specialized kind of database, anyway, and databases are surprisingly versatile.

If memory serves, you can automatically mount daily snapshots of FreeBSD's standard filesystem. (I'm using OpenBSD, which is slightly different.)

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