git

Why is my git repository so big?


145M = .git/objects/pack/

I wrote a script to add up the sizes of differences of each commit and the commit before it going backwards from the tip of each branch. I get 129MB, which is without compression and without accounting for same files across branches and common history among branches.

Git takes all those things into account so I would expect much much smaller repository. So why is .git so big?

I've done:

git fsck --full
git gc --prune=today --aggressive
git repack

To answer about how many files/commits, I have 19 branches about 40 files in each. 287 commits, found using:

git log --oneline --all|wc -l

It should not be taking 10's of megabytes to store information about this.


Solution

  • I recently pulled the wrong remote repository into the local one (git remote add ... and git remote update). After deleting the unwanted remote ref, branches and tags I still had 1.4GB (!) of wasted space in my repository. I was only able to get rid of this by cloning it with git clone file:///path/to/repository. Note that the file:// makes a world of difference when cloning a local repository - only the referenced objects are copied across, not the whole directory structure.

    Edit: Here's Ian's one liner for recreating all branches in the new repo:

    d1=#original repo
    d2=#new repo (must already exist)
    cd $d1
    for b in $(git branch | cut -c 3-)
    do
        git checkout $b
        x=$(git rev-parse HEAD)
        cd $d2
        git checkout -b $b $x
        cd $d1
    done