Re: git repository size vs. subversion repository size

On 2008.04.04 18:02:56 -0400, Sean Brown wrote:

Last night I decided to see what storage size differences I might see
between an svn repo and a git one.  So I imported a highly used
subversion repository into git and was shocked to see how huge the git
version was.  I used a repo that has a lot of branches and tagged
releases just to make sure importing into git would in fact keep all
of the history.  It did keep the history, but the total disk usage was
very different:

$subversionbox # du -hs ./my_sample_website/
67M	./my_sample_website

$localhost # du -hs ./git-samplesite/
3.6GB ./git-samplesite/

How much of that is in the .git/svn directory? The contents of that
directory are used to map git commits to svn revision and git versions
before 1.5.4 had a quite space consuming file format for that. The new
format is a lot better. If you want to switch completely, you can even
just delete the .git/svn directory, as that's only required as long as
you want to interact with the corresponding svn repository.

And finally, you might want to repack to repository once after the
initial import, to get a smaller repo. Something like:
git repack -a -d -f --window=100 --depth=100

Björn