Last Thursday I implemented `git-annex filter-process`, which you
can try enabling to make commands like `git add` and `git checkout`
faster when they operate on a lot of files.

	git config filter.annex.process 'git-annex filter-process'

On Friday, I benchmarked it
and was not surprised to find that it's slower in some cases than the
old smudge/clean filter interface, and faster in other cases. Still, good
to see actual numbers (see [[!commit 054c803f8d7cc43eb01fdf6141ab6572373c7d60]]).
The surprising good news is that it only seems to make `git add` around 10%
slower when adding a large file (to the annex presumably). Although I
know I can speed that up, eventually.

Today, I used the benchmark results to build a cost model into git-annex,
so it knows when it would be faster to have filter.annex.process set or
unset, and temporarily unsets it when that seems best. It can only
do that when it's restaging pointer files, but that was the main problem
with setting filter.annex.process really.

So I'm fairly close to wanting to enable it by default. But will probably
just wait until whenever v9 happens and do it then. Hopefully some people
will try it out in the meantime and perhaps I can refine the cost model.

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This work was sponsored by Jake Vosloo, Graham Spencer, and Dr. Land Raider
[on Patreon](https://patreon.com/joeyh)