Today we announce Git protocol version 2, a major update of Git’s wire protocol (how clones, fetches and pushes are communicated between clients and servers). This update removes one of the most inefficient parts of the Git protocol and fixes an extensibility bottleneck, unblocking the path to more wire protocol improvements in the future.

The protocol version 2 spec can be found here . The main improvements are:

Server-side filtering of references

Easy extensibility for new features like ref-in-want and fetching and pushing symrefs

Simplified client handling of the http transport

The main motivation for the new protocol was to enable server side filtering of references (branches and tags). Prior to protocol v2, servers responded to all fetch commands with an initial reference advertisement, listing all references in the repository. This complete listing is sent even when a client only cares about updating a single branch, e.g.: `git fetch origin master`.

Read more at Google open source blog