Msysgit bash is horrendously slow in Windows 7

Question

You can significantly speed up Git on Windows by running three commands to set some config options:

git config --global core.preloadindex true
git config --global core.fscache true
git config --global gc.auto 256

Notes:

core.preloadindex does filesystem operations in parallel to hide latency (update: enabled by default in git 2.1)
core.fscache fixes UAC issues so you don’t need to run Git as administrator (update: enabled by default in Git for Windows 2.8)
gc.auto minimizes the number of files in .git/