How to Speed Up git status in a Huge Game Project

When git status takes ten seconds, Git is stat-ing a quarter million files it does not need to. Here is how to make it instant again.

How to fix it

1. Turn on fsmonitor

Enable core.fsmonitor and core.untrackedCache so Git asks the OS what changed instead of walking the entire tree.

2. Ignore generated trees

Make sure Library/, Temp/, build output, and import caches are gitignored so they never enter Git's bookkeeping.

3. Use sparse checkout

For a monorepo, enable sparse checkout so each developer materializes only the folders their work touches.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.