I have a portable USB-stick on which I store a git repository containing documents. I use git on that stick to apply easy backup- and versioning-control for my documents.
Recently, I bought a new stick and switched from using the NTFS filesystem on the stick to exFAT, using Arch Linux‘ exfat-utils package, which uses FUSE to mount the filesystem.
Unfortunately, git was being totally slow when used on an exfat filesystem, resulting in a huge delay with a simple git status operation on my 3.3GiB repository:
$ time git status
[...]
real 1m20.514s
user 0m50.282s
sys 0m2.851s
As you see, over 80 seconds to do a simple git status.
I had a similar problem when switching a Borg Backup repository to exFAT, because Borg Backup uses inode-numbers for a fast check whether a file is modified, so I had the suspicion git is doing similar stuff.
Solution: At a deeper look at man git-config, I found the option core.checkStat. Setting this to the value minimal with git config core.checkStat minimal fixed the problem! See the manpage for what this option does in detail.
Now git status runs much faster:
$ time git status
[...]
real 0m0.109s
user 0m0.029s
sys 0m0.055s