git status is slow in WSL2

[tuananh]

Please fill out the below information:

• Your Windows build number: 18956

• What you're doing and what's happening: type git status

• What's wrong / what should be happening instead:

very slow. time git status gives me

On branch develop
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/develop'.
nothing to commit, working tree clean
real    0m2.210s
user    0m0.000s
sys     0m0.452s

Note that this is quite small project.

[therealkenc]

On /mnt I presume. #4197

[tuananh]

Yes. I noticed it shortly after I opened this issue.

…

On Mon, Aug 12, 2019 at 3:28 PM therealkenc ***@***.***> wrote: On /mnt I presume. #4197 <#4197> — You are receiving this because you authored the thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#4401?email_source=notifications&email_token=AAEZETSH7ZKLOZ4S6NG4I6DQEENJFA5CNFSM4IK5XT22YY3PNVWWK3TUL52HS4DFVREXG43VMVBW63LNMVXHJKTDN5WW2ZLOORPWSZGOD4B3VWY#issuecomment-520338139>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAEZETSY5ZCKEF3PWQZVKUTQEENJFANCNFSM4IK5XT2Q> .

[binarynate]

I appreciate Microsoft's work on WSL and will stick with WSL 1 until the the performance issues with accessing the Windows filesystem from WSL2 are worked out. I'm surprised that I didn't hear about this limitation ahead of time, though. The discussions I heard regarding WSL2 (like during this year's Build talks) focused on its performance improvements, so I was surprised by the significant downgrade in performance. In my case, I use WSL to interact with Unity projects targeting Windows, so using the Linux filesystem doesn't seem to be an option.

[0x49D1]

Same here and not only git status: Angular development just can't be continued; ng serve just does nothing. Other then /mnt performance - WSL2 seems OK (yes there are still high memory usage issues, but that's OK, compared to performance). And I can't migrate all my work (with .NET projects mixed with web ones) to Linux file system, so performance of /mnt fs is critical. Hope you can deal with this issue sooner or later, but it seems that more then a year of development did not overcome this problem, so probably it's very difficult to solve.

[TylerReid]

I came up with a dumb but useful workaround for this specific case. It works because windows git is faster against ntfs and I don't need any linux specific things for git at least.

I put this in my bash .profile

# checks to see if we are in a windows or linux dir
function isWinDir {
  case $PWD/ in
    /mnt/*) return $(true);;
    *) return $(false);;
  esac
}
# wrap the git command to either run windows git or linux
function git {
  if isWinDir
  then
    git.exe "$@"
  else
    /usr/bin/git "$@"
  fi
}

[bhechinger]

I came up with a dumb but useful workaround for this specific case. It works because windows git is faster against ntfs and I don't need any linux specific things for git at least.

@TylerReid This doesn't solve the issues with WSL2 obviously, but this addresses my biggest issue with WSL2 at the moment. THANK YOU SO MUCH!

[MolloKhan]

We can't leave comments anymore in the initial issue. I discovered that GIT runs not that slow when the project is small, like 2-3 seconds slower than it should be (annoying but manageable)
Another thing that I discovered is if you run GIT commands through PHPStorm's terminal it runs fast! I was expecting it to run slow as well but it does not. Perhaps this is not important but just in case. I hope this issue gets fixed soon because I really want to work with WSL2

[brentsony]

Why was this issue closed? It is still a super annoying issue (30+ seconds to return a git status or log).

One issue with the above fix, is that using git.exe is super fast (like using git in WSL1), it doesn't run the aliases you've defined in your home directory with something like git s or git l. Defining a function for each one is a workaround:

# wrap the git command to either run windows git or linux
function gits {
  if isWinDir
  then
    git.exe status -s --branch "$@"
  else
    /usr/bin/git "$@"
  fi
}
function gitl {
  if isWinDir
  then
          git.exe log -n15 --graph --abbrev-commit --date=relative --pretty='%Cred%an%Creset %w(110,0,7)%C(yellow)%d%Creset %s %Cgreen(%cr)%Creset %h' "$@"
  else
    /usr/bin/git "$@"
  fi
}

[iTaybb]

Please open this issue. This is still relevant.

[MolloKhan]

Agree