I have been using gitk for years. Today I noticed that there are a bunch of new refs in my repo. See screenshot below.

The ref is prefetch/remotes/origin/<branch>, and there is one like this for every branch.

1. What are these?
2. Why are they only showing up now?
3. How do I get rid of them?

I have been using gitk for years. Today I noticed that there are a bunch of new refs in my repo. See screenshot below.

The ref is prefetch/remotes/origin/<branch>, and there is one like this for every branch.

1. What are these?
2. Why are they only showing up now?
3. How do I get rid of them?

• git
• ref
• prefetch
• gitk

• According to grep -E "installed.*gitk" /var/log/dpkg.log, the last time gitk was touched was over 2 years ago, so it's not a recent gitk update that caused this. – nullromo Commented Mar 12 at 23:30
• Prefetching behaviour in Git changed as of version 2.42 (Aug 2023) and depending on the specific repo, the new behaviour may apply and cause these refs. Possibly you recently updated your Git and that has caused the change? You could revert to an older version of Git, or have a look at the documentation and see under what condition this happens - your repo likely has a large number of remote branches, or is slow to fetch for a similar reason. – Grismar Commented Mar 12 at 23:34
• I have git version 2.39.2 and it hasn't been updated since march 2023. – nullromo Commented Mar 12 at 23:36
• ACTUALLY I did update the remote gitlab server recently, so that probably did it. That server now has git version 2.43.0. However, my coworkers (same OS, same building/LAN, same remote repo) do not have these prefetch refs, so that part confuses me. And is 23 branches a lot of branches? – nullromo Commented Mar 12 at 23:41
• 1 I'm not sure what the cutoff is and whether that's the only metric that matters, but I've seen the same behavior on some projects and not on others for my own up to date GitLab server. By the way, it's technically not a problem - it improves performance, but I agree that it looks messy. – Grismar Commented Mar 13 at 3:07

1 Answer 1

1. They are refs used internally by Git since version 2.42 that exist to optimize performance.

2. Git was updated on the remote.

3. Unsatisfying answer, but you can't.