Historical Backfill
What is backfill?
Historical backfill analyzes past commits in your git history to build a timeline of code quality metrics. This lets you see trends, identify when complexity spiked, and measure the impact of refactoring efforts.
Running a backfill
In Vipr Desktop:
- Open a repository
- Navigate to Settings or the History section
- Select the date range and commit density
- Start the backfill
Vipr uses content-SHA deduplication to skip commits where analyzed files did not change, making the process efficient even for large histories.
Performance
- Small repos (< 500 commits): minutes
- Medium repos (500-5000 commits): 10-30 minutes
- Large repos (5000+ commits): may take hours; use sparse sampling
Viewing results
After backfill completes, the dashboard timeline widgets populate with historical data. Use the snapshot comparison view to compare any two points in time.