SourceTree 3.1.3 Performance Issue on Windows
Asked by gougmcgrath:

I use SourceTree both on a laptop and on a Windows VM, and I have colleagues with a similar setup. I'm using version 3.1.3. Recently, and across multiple versions of SourceTree, the performance on my Windows VM has degraded by a huge amount...operations taking minutes instead of seconds. This is not a networking issue; the VM has a faster networking connection to the GIT repository than the laptop, so if anything, it should be faster.

GIT is functionally normally on the command-line. Commands execute quickly and with the response I would expect.

I used procmon to see what SourceTree is doing, and to my eye, it seems to be rapidly and constantly re-reading files and checking directories for files, including at least one folder where access is denied to my user account. I suspect some kind of path issue; I've tried cleaning up my path and rearranging, but so far, none of that has had an effect.

I've reinstalled SourceTree, including going back to a 3.0.xxx version. None of that has had any effect.

The only thing that has helped some is clearing out bookmarks and old repository references that no longer exist (using the + tab and cleaning up those entries). I have only three repositories locally.

I've also toggled between embedded and system GIT. That doesn't seem to help.

Another symptom is that just trying to change the SourceTree options is slow. When I click on the OK button for the Options dialog, it locks up a couple of minutes.

This is completely unworkable right now, so any help is appreciated.


Answers:
author: Mike Corsaro
body: Hello! I suspect this is a weird disk access lag issue. You can reduce the amount of disk I/O for Sourcetree by doing the following:

* Open Tools \> Options
* **Uncheck** "Refresh automatically when files change"
* **Check** "Refresh when application is not in focus"
* **Uncheck** "Check default remotes for updates"

To help investigate performance issues:

* Open Tools \> Process Log
* Perform the action that causes Sourcetree to lockup (open close settings?)
* Observe the time it took for each command to run and let me know which one seems to be taking the longest

Thanks!

comments: author: gougmcgrath
body: Hi, thanks for the tips...I've done that. Unfortunately, nothing much seems to trigger any delay in the process output. The 7-second pull request was the only thing, and that's reasonable. It appears to me that the git commands all run reasonably fast, and that it's something within SourceTree other than running git commands that's causing the problem. The screen shot of a portion of the process output is below.

![Capture.PNG](https://community.atlassian.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/54076iD6C039E85C85E533/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Capture.PNG")


author: gougmcgrath
body: Also, I stumbled across the "Disable libgit2 integration" which seems to have helped some people. I've turned that on, and I think it might actually be helping. I'll have to work with it for a while to see for sure. At this very instant, I don't have any changes tracked.


author: gougmcgrath
body: Disabling libgit2 integration does seem to have resolved the problem for me. SourceTree is working mostly normally. Closing the Options dialog still takes a long time, but at least working with files and repositories is acceptable again.


Tags: windows