Reducing the download size of a git repository

[MTRNord]

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Hi :)

I am one of the maintainers of https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/ and we have the issue that a git clone is ~1.18GiB currently. I was wondering which are ways to identify and reduce this.

Obviously I know about LFS but the LFS pricing model is not sustainable for us so it is not an option.

We did already consider splitting out the old webpage which is lingering at https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/tree/gatsby but I am not sure if this is really the culprit of size or if removing the branch will clean up the repository in any way (note that the current main branch is a whole different root node than the gatsby branch as they were developed independently).

So I wonder a) How to identify contributing factors to the repo size b) How to reduce those factors and c) How to do this in a way that it happens not locally but on the remote side :)

If you need any further information to answer feel free to ask.

Some stats on that note:

❯ git count-objects -vH
count: 0
size: 0 Bytes
in-pack: 67027
packs: 1
size-pack: 1.18 GiB
prune-packable: 0
garbage: 0
size-garbage: 0 Bytes

(After a git multi-pack-index write --incremental && git maintenance run)

[LiteBrite82]

A couple of articles came across my news feed on this topic this week:
Microsoft engineer describes a flaw in Git that can hugely bloat repositories – fix is on the way

How we shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size by 94%

[MTRNord]

Thanks for the links. It seems to not be an option on linux currently so I cant try it :)

I went with --filter=blob:none for now which seems to ~half the size on initial clone. Its at least something. Additionally when we now reduce image/media sizes I think we get quite an impact like that. :)