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Comment by aftbit | Hacker News Reader

Github would definitely reach out if you tried to make 100k+ Github repos. We once automatically opened issues in response to exceptions (sort of a ghetto Bugsnag / Sentry) and received a nice email from an engineer asking us if we really needed to do that when we hit around the 200k mark.

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Oh here’s an interesting idea.

What if these bug reporting platforms could create a branch and tag it for each issue.

This would be particularly useful for point and time things where you have an immutable deployment branch. So it could create a branch off that immutable deployment branch and tag it, so you always have a point in time code reference for bugs.

Would that be useful? I feel like what you’re doing here isn’t that different if I get what’s going on (basically creating one repository per bug?)

Github werent terribly happy with the number of branches we created for this type of use case at one point.

A branch doesn't use any more space than a commit... I'm curious what their complaint was with a large number of branches?

There are various repositories with 500k+ commits

I’m assuming GitHub has a fair amount of database/cache overhead for most things, especially branches. I think that most things the web client sees are all database content and that there’s no usage of git/filesystem in any hot paths for web views.

So I can easily see why having many branches is more storage than the same number of commits.

It might be something silly like the number of items in the Branches dropbox menu.

That actually worked really well, and provides great branch search features when you have lots.

We appeared on a list of the top 10 most egregious users of github so I assume they had database entries for these…

Why not just keep the sha of the release in the big report?

In some ways, you could imagine repos might be more scalable than issues within a repo, since you could reasonably assume a bound on the number of issues in a single repo.

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