Very slow west update

[Chris Pearson]

I'm having an issue with "west update" taking a very long time on a Windows 11 machine. (Multiple hours) This install of the nRF Connect SDK is just over one month old, and was done on a new Windows 11 install. 

Today, when looking at the notification pop-up on the right side of the status bar (bottom-right of VS Code), I noticed the message "The SDK is out of sync" and a link to "west update". I clicked that update link. What followed was a very slow update process that I terminated after two hours. I have to assume that this isn't intended behaviour, given that simply reinstalling the nRF Connect SDK is far, far faster. 

Looking at the output from "west update", a problem appears to be shown by the repeated messages "Auto packing the repository in background for optimum performance". Each of these messages was followed by a lengthy delay.

The output I saw, up to the point I cancelled the "west update", is in this Onedrive file: 1drv.ms/.../s!ApV4t-ortvt8jaQongwVUHcRApxEow

Is this expected behaviour, or is there something wrong?

Thanks!

[Menon]

Hello,

Are you inside any company firewall? It doesn't make sense that reinstalling is faster while the West update is slow. Have you noticed if the entire VSCode is running slowly?

I don't see any potential cause for the issue you've raised, but I might need to check this internally.

Kind regards,
Abhijith

[Chris Pearson]

No, there's no company firewall blocking this machine. All my internet activities seem to be normal.

The reinstall of the nRF Connect SDK (the toolchain and SDK code steps) were about what I expected for speed, as well. A few minutes, tops, and nothing like the hours the update was taking.

From my point of view, the problem seemed to be related to the excessive git garbage collection / auto packing of the repositories. Presumably this doesn't need to happen so many times during a single update. Unfortunately, not knowing the underlying system, that's about as far as I can guess. 

[Menon]

Hello,

Yes, from the logs you shared, I can see frequent messages about auto-packing, which suggests that the auto-packing process is either running more often than necessary or is taking longer than expected. You can manually trigger Git's garbage collection to see if it resolves the issue. This might help consolidate some of the packing processes.

Refer to the Git documentation on git gc, and you might try running git gc --aggressive --prune=now. From the logs, I don’t see any issues related to the extension.

Kind regards,

Abhijith