That file list is pretty huge by itself! https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/fe129641ilma3mk/blah.zip

I only made minor changes from the official release branch, so it's probably best if you just clone that one: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/commits/release

You'd need to make an unreal account and link your github account on their site to view that page.

The build environment is pretty straight forward. You need either

a) VS 2015 with c++ support

or

b) VS 2017 with following packages:

- Game dev for c++

- Desktop dev for c++

- Desktop dev for .net

- Windows 8.1 SDK under individual components

Then just

1) Clone release branch

2) Run Setup.bat (this step downloads thousands of files from somewhere)

3) Run GenerateProjectFiles.bat

4) Open UE4.sln

5) Build the UE4 target, or the entire solution to generate more hidden stuff

Not really, it's over 60GB. However you could create an unreal engine account, then download and build it to get pretty much the same result.

There's the Intermediate folder which contains all of the build files, but it only has 16000 files in it, the others are scattered all over the place. So it probably wouldn't help that much

Probably worth noting that a "git status" also finishes in < 1 second with all the hidden files, so it's definitely possible to make it faster.

Seems like you're right. A fresh clone without any hidden intermediate files refreshes lightning fast, in less than a second.

Unfortunately I'm not sure how much I can do about the .gitignore file. First it's provided by unreal engine, and it's rather weird, almost like an inverse: https://pastebin.com/KXEHn9CV

Maybe something can be done to make processing the ignored files faster?

Oh. Your help page says to click that after. Here's a new log file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/t0jc9cbi1wziiqs/log2.zip

The repo contains around 80000 tracked files, plus 60000 ignored ones.

To test for yourself you'd have to create an unreal engine account and follow these steps: https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github, then run Setup.bat after the clone finished.

It doesn't seem to become faster. Here's the log file: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/s/bpienbxg1qccc7m/log.zip

I opened/closed the repo 3 times, then clicked the "create periodical thread dumps".

It's way faster, but still takes almost 10 seconds, with very low cpu usage. What is it actually doing during that time?