Rclone with Google Drive too slow for git operations

Help and Support
1

What is the problem you are having with rclone?

All git operations are extremely slow with rclone on Google Drive

On local disk

$ time git clone https://github.com/linux-rdma/rdma-core
Cloning into 'rdma-core'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 81334, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (884/884), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (211/211), done.
remote: Total 81334 (delta 771), reused 673 (delta 673), pack-reused 80450 (from 2)
Receiving objects: 100% (81334/81334), 30.86 MiB | 29.82 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (64226/64226), done.

real    0m2.230s
user    0m2.983s
sys     0m0.399s

On rclone Google Drive mount

$ time git clone https://github.com/linux-rdma/rdma-core
Cloning into 'rdma-core'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 81334, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (866/866), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (227/227), done.
remote: Total 81334 (delta 753), reused 639 (delta 639), pack-reused 80468 (from 2)
Receiving objects: 100% (81334/81334), 30.89 MiB | 31.82 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (64191/64191), done.
Updating files: 100% (1267/1267), done.

real    2m4.315s
user    0m3.095s
sys     0m0.506s

Run the command 'rclone version' and share the full output of the command.

$ rclone version
rclone v1.75.0

  • os/version: ubuntu 24.04 (64 bit)
  • os/kernel: 7.0.0-28-generic (x86_64)
  • os/type: linux
  • os/arch: amd64
  • go/version: go1.26.5
  • go/linking: static
  • go/tags: none

Which cloud storage system are you using? (eg Google Drive)

Google Drive

The command you were trying to run (eg rclone copy /tmp remote:tmp)

Any git operation

git status
git log
git clone
git diff
...

Please run 'rclone config redacted' and share the full output. If you get command not found, please make sure to update rclone.

My config file has the Google Drive client secret and sudo rclone config redacted tries to read root's config file. The relevant config is

$ cat /etc/systemd/system/rclone-mount.service 
[Unit]
Description=rclone service
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rclone mount \
        --config=/home/user/.config/rclone/rclone.conf \
        --vfs-cache-mode full \
        --vfs-cache-max-age 8736h \
        --dir-cache-time 8736h \
        --vfs-cache-max-size 64G \
        --vfs-fast-fingerprint \
        --max-read-ahead 16G \
        --no-checksum \
        --vfs-read-ahead 16G \
        --allow-other \
        --allow-root \
        --noappledouble \
        --log-file=/var/log/rclone.log \
        --log-level NOTICE \
        --write-back-cache \
        GDrive:Shortcuts/Career /home/user/Career
ExecStop=/bin/fusermount -u /home/user/Career
Restart=always
RestartSec=10

[Install]
WantedBy=default.target


$ sudo cat /home/user/.config/rclone/rclone.conf
[GDrive]
type = drive
scope = drive
token = {"access_token":<REDACTED>,"token_type":"Bearer","refresh_token":<REDACTED>,"expiry":"2026-08-02T17:39:31.748348578-07:00"}
team_drive = 
client_id = <REDACTED>
client_secret = <REDACTED>

A log from the command that you were trying to run with the -vv flag

No relevant logs

Is Google Drive simply too slow for git? Google Drive worked fine on mac OS with the native Google Drive app. I can't just pre-cache because cloning new repos is also extremely slow.

If Google Drive is no good, what's another cloud storage provider that's better with git and is well supported for both Linux and mac OS?

2

welcome to the forum,

i suggest the following as a test

  1. remove --max-read-ahead 16G and --vfs-read-ahead 16G
  2. increase --transfers
  3. use a debug log and look for errors, pacer and other potential issues.

i think so. this is much discussed in the forum and the rclone docs
Drive has quite a lot of rate limiting. This causes rclone to be limited to transferring about 2 files per second only. Individual files may be transferred much faster at 100s of MiB/s but lots of small files can take a long time.

based on --vfs-cache-max-size 64G, the total amount of data is small.
so, run git on local, and then rclone sync to cloud

in all my testing, as of a few years ago, as i have posted in the forum a couple of times.
nothing is faster with lots of small files than wasabi.
they offer a free trial.

also, let's see what other forum members post about this

3

I fully agree. Would be my recommendation as well.

@abattleofwords I am curious why do you try to use git this way? You are using github already (as I can see from your post). Fork a repo you work on and clone it to your local disk. Standard git workflow will keep your data locally and in the cloud (github). Why to complicate something what is simple? If you feel better by having extra cloud copies then as already mentioned simply `rclone sync` or use any other backup software.