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Comment by Lutger | Hacker News Reader

Why do you need more than 5gb for a git repo? IMHO, any repo above 100mb should have an exceptional reason for being so big, and if it's just code a normal repo is more like 1 to 10 mb in size, max.

You don't even need to pay gitlab, free tier can do for most stuff and there's a generous sponsorship for Open Source.

I don't get all the hate Gitlab is receiving these days.

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I do hardware hacking, presentations, code, pictures, and full media to reproduce what I've shared.

FreeCAD files get big. And to accommodate easy printing, STLs are also needed.

KiCAD for board layout and schematics can also get larger. And remember, these also have 3d board components too.

Presentations are naturally larger.

Full high-rez pictures eat storage like you wouldn't believe.

Code is small, thankfully.

One such device I have created is hovering around 4.5GB for a full reproduction for the current snapshot. And if you do the command to pull the whole history (and not current), its around 10GB. And, I'm not sure if GL is counting the whole history, or the current? And are they pruning old after a certain date?

> And, I'm not sure if GL is counting the whole history, or the current? And are they pruning old after a certain date?

GitLab stores the Git history with all data revisions as commits. To reduce the repository storage [0], older Git commits can be pruned but this would rewrite the Git history as an invasive change [1]. To store larger files, it is recommended to use Git LFS [2]. Alternatively, you can use the generic package registry to store data. [3]

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/usage_quotas.html#manage-you...

[1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/reducing_...

[2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/topics/git/lfs/

[3] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/generic_packages/

Larger heavily contributed to repositories can be quite large, even if they are just plain code. Sure, not quite 5 GB large, but still.

Linux:

  $ git clone https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
  $ du -h linux/.git
  ...
  2.8G    linux/.git

Git:

  $ git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git.git
  $ du -h git/.git
  ...
  120M    git/.git

DefinitelyTyped:

  $ git clone https://github.com/DefinitelyTyped/DefinitelyTyped
  $ du -h DefinitelyTyped/.git
  850M    DefinitelyTyped/.git

home-assistant/core:

  $ git clone https://github.com/home-assistant/core
  $ du -h DefinitelyTyped/.git
  380M    core/.git

The above is also only taking into account repo size, while the GitLab limit applies to everything including release artifacts, CI build artifacts, hosted containers, etc. Many of which GitLab currently provides poor or sometimes even zero support for implementing purging.

I don’t think using the Linux kernel, which is the OG repo that git was created for, is a fair comparison. Though, I guess since it’s barely 3GB, it’s proof that you almost never need >5GB.

It's not just Git. Gitlab hosts a container registry for every repo, so if you build and store a new container image regularly then you could easily top 5GB.

Build react hello world and you’ve got gigabyte docker.

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