Re: large(25G) repository in git

From: Adam Heath <doogie@brainfood.com>
Date: Mar 24, 2009, 21:44 UTC
Message-ID: <49C95453.9080503@brainfood.com>
In-Reply-To: <20090324210427.GC30959@zoy.org>

Sam Hocevar wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

>    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.

Show 6 quoted lines

>    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.