Re: git repository size vs. subversion repository size

From: Björn Steinbrink <b.steinbrink@gmx.de>
Date: Apr 4, 2008, 22:17 UTC
Message-ID: <20080404221728.GA30728@atjola.homenet>
In-Reply-To: <1086fb5f0804041502s7ab12202y3b0ec3640425eff@mail.gmail.com>

On 2008.04.04 18:02:56 -0400, Sean Brown wrote:

Show 13 quoted lines

> Last night I decided to see what storage size differences I might see
> between an svn repo and a git one.  So I imported a highly used
> subversion repository into git and was shocked to see how huge the git
> version was.  I used a repo that has a lot of branches and tagged
> releases just to make sure importing into git would in fact keep all
> of the history.  It did keep the history, but the total disk usage was
> very different:
> 
> $subversionbox # du -hs ./my_sample_website/
> 67M	./my_sample_website
> 
> $localhost # du -hs ./git-samplesite/
> 3.6GB ./git-samplesite/

How much of that is in the .git/svn directory? The contents of that directory are used to map git commits to svn revision and git versions before 1.5.4 had a quite space consuming file format for that. The new format is a lot better. If you want to switch completely, you can even just delete the .git/svn directory, as that's only required as long as you want to interact with the corresponding svn repository.

And finally, you might want to repack to repository once after the initial import, to get a smaller repo. Something like: git repack -a -d -f --window=100 --depth=100

Björn