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Comment by StefanKarpinski | Hacker News Reader

Please file an issue describing the situation: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/new

After the issue, I nuked the .julia folder, and now it is taking too long to clone the "JuliaRegistries/General.git" repo.

By the download speed, it might take a few hours before I can plot something.

It also seems that just doing "git clone JuliaRegistries/General.git" is much faster than doing "] add Plots"

Is this on Windows? I've experienced the same for the past few releases in Windows. For some reason that clone step is ridiculously slow.

Window registry issues have been a thing.

I have heard it is to do with how windows antivirus works. Since the registry is like 10,000 seperate files. It chokes on them.

I have heard there is an upcoming feature to allow the package manager to work with the registry being kept inside a tarball, which is specifically being added to deal with this

It's not an av issue, at least not on my machine.

Yes.

> (@v1.6) pkg> add Plots Installing known registries into `~\.julia` Cloning registry from "https://github.com/JuliaRegistries/General.git" Fetching: [==> ] 3.4 %

I gave up because it's just too slow (more than 15 min to get to 3%).

Maybe plotting is indeed faster, but I don't think I'll actually get to that point.

Did you try a manual git clone to rule out any network or FS issues?

A manual git clone is very slow for the Julia registry, but it's still an order of magnitude faster...

Is your home folder on a network drive?

Nope.

This is a Windows issue, I'm pretty sure. My solution is easy, install Julia under WSL. In fact, after moving from MacOS to Windows, this is my goto solution: install as much as I can under WSL.

Problem disappeared.

A quick bit of googling shows that people have been complaining about and reporting this for years.

Many years of being on the receiving end of issues shows that there are a large number of different potential problems which manifest themselves in similar ways. Some are fixed, some persist, some may be new. If people don’t file issues describing exactly what they tried and what happened, this vague complaint just goes into the bucket of “Who knows? Hopefully someone else files a proper bug report.”

I’m not sure what issue you think you identified by googling such a short problem description, but it seems like it could be any of:

- slow internet connection

- firewall / proxy issues

- antivirus gumming things up

- file system being slow when dealing with lots of small files (Windows mostly)

- precompiling Plots took longer than expected

- precompiling Plots hit a deadlock

- loading Plots took longer than expected

- loading Plots hit a deadlock

- something else?

Worse, what “stuck” means is also ambiguous. Does that mean it failed with an error? Does that mean a download started but then was too slow for the user’s taste? Does it mean that a download started but never got any data at all? How long did the user wait?

My best guess is that git cloning the registry on Windows is taking a long time and isn’t actually stuck. There’s a fix for that being worked on for 1.7 (don’t unpack registries).

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