SourceTree freezes when loading commit history for repositories with thousands of commits

SourceTree Commit History Loading Behavior

SourceTree retrieves complete commit history using Git's native log commands without server-side pagination. When users navigate to branches containing thousands of commits, the application loads the entire history into memory and parses it locally before rendering the UI. This full result set retrieval can cause significant delays and interface freezing, particularly during initial branch switching or when using the 'Show All' filter option.

The underlying Git process executes rev-list and log commands that return all matching commits at once, rather than implementing chunked loading or lazy evaluation. While Git itself handles large histories efficiently for command-line operations, SourceTree's GUI approach may struggle with memory allocation and rendering performance when processing extensive commit sets.

Users experiencing this behavior often cannot distinguish between network latency and computational overhead, as the UI provides no progress indication during the full history traversal. The issue becomes more pronounced with repositories containing complex branching histories or large binary assets referenced in commits.

Key Questions

• Does SourceTree implement any client-side caching or incremental loading for commit history beyond basic Git object caching?
• What configuration options exist in SourceTree preferences that might affect how large commit histories are processed?
• How does the performance differ between SourceTree versions 3.x and 4.x when handling repositories with over 10,000 commits?