Tuning rebase performance on Windows

One of our Windows users has reported that rebasing a large feature branch takes significantly longer with recent SmartGit versions.

SmartGit comes with its own Git bundled which we are usually updating for every major SmartGit release. As it turns out, since Git version 2.26, the rebase backend has been switched from “apply” to “merge” which is in general superior, but which seems to run slower on Windows, at least for specific scenarios (we couldn’t identify any significant slowdown on Linux).

To improve rebase performance to pre-Git 2.26, you can switch back to the old “apply” backend. To better understand whether this is a viable solution for you, first make sure that the subtle differences between both backends will be acceptable. If so, you may configure per-repository:

$ git config rebase.backend apply

or globally:

$ git config --global rebase.backend apply