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How to speed up Git LFS checkouts

LFS objects download serially and dominate checkout time.

4 min read

LFS objects download serially and dominate checkout time.

Why it happens

actions/checkout fetches LFS objects one at a time by default and the LFS cache is not persisted.

How to fix it

  1. Set lfs: true and then run git lfs pull with a higher concurrency setting
  2. Cache .git/lfs between runs keyed on the LFS pointer files
  3. Fetch only the LFS paths the job actually needs with include filters

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