Two Git Config Lines Cut git status Time on a Large Repo From 17.6s to 0.83s

A clean git status on a 393,000-file Chromium checkout took 17.6 seconds, but GitHub's benchmark dropped that to 0.83 seconds after enabling two configuration settings. Both settings, filesystem monitoring and the untracked cache, have been included in stock Git for years but are disabled by default. The discussion follows OpenAI's November 2026 post on scaling Git, which describes how it kept the Git protocol and client while rebuilding the server to handle heavy traffic from Codex agents. The company's internal Pando backend reportedly cut median push latency by roughly 80% and has run in production since April, though OpenAI has not announced a release. The article argues that developers facing slow local operations should first review their Git configuration, and it outlines other settings such as partial clones, sparse checkout, and commit-graph options.