Do I ever need to run git gc on a bare repo?

Question

man git-gc doesn't have an obvious answer in it, and I haven't had any luck with Google either (although I might have just been using the wrong search terms).

I understand that you should occasionally run git gc on a local repository to prune dangling objects and compress history, among other things -- but is a shared bare repository susceptible to these same issues?

If it matters, our workflow is multiple developers pulling from and pushing to a bare repository on a shared network drive. The "central" repository was created with git init --bare --shared.

Answer 1

I do not know 100% about the logic of gc.. but to reason this out:

git gc removed extra history junk, compresses extra history, etc. It does nothing with your local copies of files.

The only difference between a bare and normal repo is if you have local copies of files.

So, I think it stands to reason that YES, you should run git gc on a bare repo.

I have never personally ran it, but my repo is pretty small and is still fast.

Answer 2

Some operations run git gc --auto automatically, so there should never be the need to run git gc, git should take care of this by itself.

Contrary to what bwawok said, there actually is (or might be) a difference between your local repo and that bare one: What operations you do with it. For example dangling objects can be created by rebasing, but it may be possible that you never rebase the bare repo, so maybe you don't ever need to remove them (because there are never any). And thus you may not need to use git gc that often. But then again, like I said, git should take care of this automatically.

Answer 3

From the git-gc man page:

Users are encouraged to run this task on a regular basis within each repository to maintain good disk space utilization and good operating performance.

Emphasis mine. Bare repositories are repositories too!

Further explanation: one of the housekeeping tasks that git-gc performs is packing and repacking of loose objects. Even if you never have any dangling objects in your bare repository, you will -- over time -- accumulate lots of loose objects. These loose objects should periodically get packed, for efficiency. Similarly, if a large number of packs accumulate, they should periodically get repacked into larger (fewer) packs.