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Pack mode, measured on the source watch
The source watch is the newsroom’s biggest vault: 16 commits, 29,861 files, 63,662 objects, 1,614.4 MB, growing by about 5,000 objects a pass. On 23 October it was copied, with sgit pack import, into a pack vault (7r83qic5), pushed, cloned fresh and checked file for file. The same operations were then run against both. The pack vault cloned in 95 seconds where the normal vault took 13 minutes 47 seconds, and pushed its whole history in 96 seconds, while one pass’s push to the normal vault took 2 hours 42 minutes and 12 attempts. How to move a vault is in the brief.
827 s against 95 s
63,662 objects, 1,221.7 MB, one go
one snapshot, whatever the history
1,614.4 MB to 1,184.2 MB
The same operations, side by side
| Operation | Normal vault (sgit-ai 0.23.0) | Pack vault (sgit-ai 0.24.0) |
|---|---|---|
| Fresh clone of the whole vault | 13 min 47 s read-only clone with the published read key, 22:01 UTC; the server's object listing timed out (504), so the client walked the history and fetched 34,453 file objects as it found them | 95 s full clone, 16:47 UTC: one 1,221.7 MB snapshot in 4 requests (54.7 s), then unpacked |
| List the vault's objects on the server | HTTP 504 after 91 s GET /api/vault/list/oq9gflln?prefix=bare/data/ at 22:16 UTC: HTTP 504 Gateway Timeout after 90.8 s | 0.73 s the same call for 7r83qic5: HTTP 200 in 0.73 s |
| Pull with nothing new | 34 s sgit fetch at 19:08 UTC | 4 s sgit pull at 19:08 UTC |
Why the normal vault got slower: the server can no longer list it
A normal vault stores every object as its own file on the server, and several operations start by asking the server for the list of them. For the watch, that list now holds over 60,000 entries, and the server’s gateway gives up first: listing bare/data/ for oq9gflln returned 504 Gateway Timeout after 90.8 seconds, while the same call for the pack vault answered in 0.73 seconds. A clone then falls back to walking the history and fetching objects as it finds them, which is why it took 827 seconds. A push that cannot list the vault fails outright: five of the attempts below. It will only get worse as the watch grows.
One pass, pushed to the normal vault
| # | Start (UTC) | End | Outcome | What happened |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 16:32 | 16:55 | failed | connection reset by peer, after uploading began |
| 2 | 16:56 | 17:11 | failed | network or I/O failure |
| 3 | 17:11 | 17:36 | failed | cut at the 25-minute cap |
| 4 | 17:37 | 17:44 | failed | the server answered with an HTML error page: nothing was pushed |
| 5 | 17:45 | 17:58 | failed | connection reset by peer |
| 6 | 18:00 | 18:07 | failed | 504 Gateway Timeout listing the vault |
| 7 | 18:08 | 18:16 | failed | 504 Gateway Timeout listing the vault |
| 8 | 18:17 | 18:24 | failed | 504 Gateway Timeout listing the vault |
| 9 | 18:25 | 18:33 | failed | 504 Gateway Timeout listing the vault |
| 10 | 18:34 | 18:41 | failed | 504 Gateway Timeout listing the vault |
| 11 | 18:42 | 19:07 | failed | cut at the 25-minute cap |
| 12 | 19:09 | 19:14 | pushed | Pushed 1 commit(s), 6161 object(s) uploaded, in 4 min 29 s |
The day before, on 22 October, pushes of 1,000 to 6,000 objects failed the same ways: connections reset or closed by the remote end, a 401 in the middle of a retry, and refusals to retry while files were uncommitted.
| Push, 22 October | File objects | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| run of 17:15 | 3,527 | connection reset, pushed later |
| runs of the afternoon | 3,799 | pushed |
| languages pass | 4,624 | pushed |
| languages pass, second part | 1,126 | remote end closed the connection; refused on retry while files were uncommitted |
| pass of 20:53 and fixes | 6,063 | connection reset, then 401 Unauthorized, then pushed |
| a 7-object fix | 7 | remote end closed the connection |
Every pass is a bigger push
| When | Commit | File objects |
|---|---|---|
| 22 Oct 14:20 | run | 2,542 |
| 22 Oct | tip and fixes | 1,175 |
| 22 Oct 17:15 | run | 3,527 |
| 22 Oct | fixes | 272 |
| 22 Oct 18:16 | languages pass | 4,624 |
| 22 Oct | languages pass | 1,126 |
| 22 Oct | cyber desk | 213 |
| 22 Oct 20:53 | pass | 4,419 |
| 22 Oct 21:05 | probe | 305 |
| 22 Oct | collectors | 7 |
| 23 Oct 01:40 | pass | 4,727 |
| 23 Oct | curator queue | 1 |
| 23 Oct 08:30 | pass | 5,229 |
| 23 Oct | scanner noise | 125 |
| 23 Oct 16:31 | pass | 6,161 |
What the pack vault did, and how it was checked
| On the pack vault | Time | What |
|---|---|---|
| Import (local: rewrite the history into packs) | 3 min 14 s | 16 commits, 29,193 trees, 34,453 blobs; 1,614.4 MB to 1,184.2 MB |
| First push: the whole history | 96 s | Pushed 16 commit(s), 63,662 object(s) uploaded |
| Push of one small commit | 77 s | 4 objects; most of the time is local |
| Pull of another agent's commit (22:32 UTC) | 2 min 56 s | the scheduled Sonnet session's commit 1cc186cccd43, 241 rows queued in index/promote.json: fast-forward, 1 file modified; the download is one zip, the rest is local |
| Commit and push of a one-file correction (22:4x UTC) | 77 s | commit 43595f6f6fe3, the corrected queue: 4 objects uploaded, in sync after; the same 77 s as the first small push |
| Pull of one new commit into a second clone | 5 min 24 s | 1 file added; not yet profiled, the network part is one zip |
| Verify every object in the pack | — | sgit pack verify: 63,662 members checked against their ids, ok |
- a fresh clone of the pack vault and the import are identical, file for file (diff -rq): 29,861 files
- against the live clone, the only differences are empty folders and Python's __pycache__, which a vault does not store
- the same 16 commits, messages and times; the commit ids are new, as the import says they will be
- sgit pack verify: ok
- in use: the scheduled Sonnet session pushed its first commit to the pack vault at about 22:17 UTC, researcher@php.newsroom pulled it and pushed a correction on top; two writers in turn, no merge needed, the vault in sync after each
What pack mode does not fix
- Local walks: commit, status, push and pull still walk the working tree; on 29,861 files a push of 4 objects took 77 s (twice, the same) and a pull of one commit took 176 s to 324 s on the pack vault.
- No web view: vault.sgraph.ai, dev.vault.sgraph.ai and vault apps cannot read packs, so a pack vault opens there as empty.
- --path and --depth download the whole vault on a pack vault in this version.
- Compaction is manual: one named agent runs sgit pack compact every ~50 pushes; a clone that was behind then downloads the whole snapshot (1.2 GB here).
How this page is made
Every number is in data/pack-mode.json, from a timed command or a log line in researcher@php.newsroom’s session on 2026-10-23, from a cloud sandbox to dev.send.sgraph.ai. One run of each, not a median: network times from a sandbox vary between runs, and the CLI team’s own medians are on cli.sgit.ai. The charts are drawn from the same file when the site is built. The live watch stays oq9gflln until the editor decides; the pack vault is registered on the vaults page.