Subject: Re: large(25G) repository in git

From: Adam Heath <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:44:51 -0500

Sam Hocevar wrote:
>    As stated several times by Linus and others, Git was not designed
> to handle large files. My stance on the issue is that before trying
> to optimise operations so that they perform well on large files, too,
> Git should usually avoid such operations, especially deltification.
> One notable exception would be someone storing their mailbox in Git,
> where deltification is a major space saver. But usually, these large
> files are binary blobs that do not benefit from delta search (or even
> compression).

Yeah, in this case, I *know* that my binary blobs are completely
different, and it's just a waste of time for git to come to the same
conclusion.  I'd be perfectly willing to have some knob I could turn
that would tell git this.

>    Since I also need to handle large files (80 GiB repository), I am
> cleaning up some fixes I did, which can be seen in the git-bigfiles
> project (http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/git-bigfiles). I have not yet tried
> to change git-push (because I submit through git-p4), but I hope to
> address it, too. As time goes I believe some of them could make it into
> mainstream Git.

I'd almost be willing to help.  I know the basic premise to how git
works, but the devil is in the details, and I don't have time right
now to learn the internals.

Yet another thing to add to my todo list.

>    In your particular case, I would suggest setting pack.packSizeLimit
> to something lower. This would reduce the time spent generating a new
> pack file if the problem were to happen again.

Yeah, saw that one, but *after* I had this problem.  The default, if
not set, is unlimited, which in this case, is definately *not* what we
want.