pop_most_recent_commit() calls commit_list_insert_by_date() for parent commits, which is itself called in a loop. This can lead to quadratic complexity if there are many merges. Replace the commit_list with a prio_queue to ensure logarithmic worst case complexity and convert all three users. Add a performance test that exercises one of them using a pathological history that consists of 50% merges and 50% root commits to demonstrate the speedup: Test v2.50.1 HEAD ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1501.2: rev-parse ':/65535' 2.48(2.47+0.00) 0.20(0.19+0.00) -91.9% Alas, sane histories don't benefit from the conversion much, and traversing Git's own history takes a 1% performance hit on my machine: $ hyperfine -w3 -L git ./git_2.50.1,./git '{git} rev-parse :/^Initial.revision' Benchmark 1: ./git_2.50.1 rev-parse :/^Initial.revision Time (mean ± σ): 1.071 s ± 0.004 s [User: 1.052 s, System: 0.017 s] Range (min … max): 1.067 s … 1.078 s 10 runs Benchmark 2: ./git rev-parse :/^Initial.revision Time (mean ± σ): 1.079 s ± 0.003 s [User: 1.060 s, System: 0.017 s] Range (min … max): 1.074 s … 1.083 s 10 runs Summary ./git_2.50.1 rev-parse :/^Initial.revision ran 1.01 ± 0.00 times faster than ./git rev-parse :/^Initial.revision Signed-off-by: René Scharfe <l.s.r@web.de> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>