Git for Windows provides a BASH emulation used to run Git from the command line. *NIX users should feel right at home.

Whiter Shade Pale more. I love git and use it on OS X pretty much constantly at home. At work, we use svn on Windows, but want to migrate to git as soon as the tools have fully matured (not just, but also something akin the really nice Visual Studio integration provided by ). But I digress. I recently installed on my Windows 7 machine, and when using the included version of bash, it is horrendously slow.

And not just the git operations; clear takes about five seconds. Has anyone experienced a similar issue? Edit: It appears that msysgit is not playing nicely with and might just be a tiny design oversight resulting from developing on XP or running Vista or 7 with UAC disabled; starting Git Bash using Run as administrator results in the lightning speed I see with OS X (or on 7 after starting Git Bash w/o a network connection - see @Gauthier answer). Edit 2: See my answer.

You can significantly speed up git on Windows by running three commands to set some config options: $ git config --global core.preloadindex true $ git config --global core.fscache true $ git config --global gc.auto 256 Notes: • core.preloadindex does filesystem operations in parallel to hide latency (update: enabled by default in git 2.1) • core.fscache fixes UAC issues so you don't need to run git as admin (update: enabled by default in Git for Windows 2.8) • gc.auto minimizes the number of files in.git/. Alas 'Run as Administrator' didn't work for me - but as Kevin L found, disconnecting the network adapter, launching git bash, then reconnecting worked fine. So I wrapped this up in a batch script and put a shortcut to it in my Start menu, flagged to run as admin: netsh interface set interface 'Local Area Connection' DISABLED cd '%USERPROFILE% Documents Visual Studio 2010 Projects' start cmd /c 'C: Program Files Git bin sh.exe' --login -i' netsh interface set interface 'Local Area Connection' ENABLED Works a treat as long as I remember my network gets momentarily cut off.