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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

If people want a concrete example, here's a 6 GB repo that's 90% Java, 5% C, then some other languages.

It's not even a mono-repo - this is just part of the project.

Maybe someone's got some tools that let them dig around in the history and find large things or explain why it's so large? I don't think they've been checking ISOs in.

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I was really taken aback by this given my previous experience with the Linux kernel git repo size. So, I just checked out Graal.

Receiving objects: 100% (981372/981372), 187.08 MiB | 6.39 MiB/s, done.

% du -sh graal 328M graal

% du -sh .git 221M .git

And that includes many binary files that were added and removed over time, but not filter-branched out of existence, including jars, pngs, pdfs :)

(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10622179/how-to-find-ide...)

Huh... maybe I have a degenerate copy for having it so long and I should try running the compression commands myself.

See also “git prune” to remove references to branches and objects no longer on the remote server. Check the docs though I think in some cases I might delete local branches or objects so make a backup first.

I'm totally not surprised that large repos exist, without having fallen prey to any antipatterns. Just saying that I know "have you committed any binaries, dependencies, generated code, etc" are the first questions I tend to ask when somebody tells me their repo is massive. In part selection bias, though, because usually the people working on super old projects know exactly why.

https://rtyley.github.io/bfg-repo-cleaner/

git filter repo has tools for analyzing history

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