Git performance degrades over time in large repositories with thousands of commits, large files, and many contributors — slow git status, git fetch, and git log operations indicate the repository needs maintenance. As the creator of CoreUI with 25 years of open-source development experience, I regularly optimize the CoreUI repository and contributor workflows to keep Git operations fast as the codebase grows. The primary tools are git maintenance for automated upkeep, git gc for manual cleanup, and repository configuration settings that enable performance optimizations. Most optimizations are one-time setup or periodic maintenance commands that dramatically improve day-to-day performance.