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Comment by Chyzwar | Hacker News Reader

> It has nothing to do with the Windows filesystem; Git simply cannot support a 5 GB working tree on any filesystem.

Can you provide a reference? I was searching a bit and only things I found was bugs in windows[1] for git lfs.

> You can call this "pathological" but this throws a lot of shade on monorepos without much critical examination of how or when they might be useful.

Windows codebase has 3.5 million files and its repo is 300GB in size. It is not normal. This is google or MS type of problem and not average git user. MS instead changing workflow decided to create GVFS[2]

[1] https://github.com/git-lfs/git-lfs/issues/2434 [2] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/bharry/2017/05/24/the-large...

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> Can you provide a reference? I was searching a bit and only things I found was bugs in windows[1] for git lfs.

Apologies, I hastily mistyped, I meant 500 GB, not 5. (5 GB is about the size of my repository, which is not really so big at all and certainly something git can cope with on its own).

This series of articles should illustrate some of the issues that VFS for Git tries to address. ("GVFS" is now called "VFS for Git".)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/learn/git/tech...

And this is a series of articles from an engineer who's been working on improving perf in large repositories in general, not strictly related to the Windows repository:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/06/25/superchar...

> Windows codebase has 3.5 million files and its repo is 300GB in size. It is not normal. This is google or MS type of problem and not average git user. MS instead changing workflow decided to create GVFS[2]

I didn't say it was normal. Indeed it's uncommon. I said it wasn't pathological.

If you're versioning line-based text, and you have 80 ASCII characters per line, stored as ASCII/UTF-8, a worktree of 500GB has 6.7 billion lines.

That's 3x the source line count of Google's entire monorepo. [1]

So if you're using git for source code, 500GB is beyond pathological.

If you're using git for other purposes, then yes you might need something like Annex/LFS/GVFS.

[1] https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-st...

Plastic SCM claims that 5TB works and that 50GB is the average size in their cloud offering. It seems that the Free Software world does not care about such use cases.

https://medium.com/@psluaces/plasticscm-vs-git-c17934fad7ed

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