Comments on: Git Side Benefit: Reducing Disk Usage

By: justaddwater.dk | Using Git for SVN Repositories Workflow

justaddwater.dk | Using Git for SVN Repositories Workflow — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 18:46:45 +0000

[...] the last months I have been using Git to work with my Subversion repositories. Besides from reducing disk usage, Git also makes my work slightly faster and independent of network access — I can make [...]

By: subbarao

subbarao — Wed, 09 Mar 2011 11:54:32 +0000

Hey guys, I want to know the exact procedure used by git to reduce disk usage i.e. the algorithm used by it to store changes. Any suggestions ???

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:46:05 +0000

See https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSvnComparison
They say there that GIT version of Mozilla repository is 420 MB instead of 12 GB in SVN.
But that’s the remote repository, which does not really matter to me :-)
What matters to me is that when I download it to my machine, with GIT I have to download the entire 420 MB :-( while with SVN only a snapshot of the latest sources.
Distributed VCSs are good for large decentralized projects.

By: Jesper Rønn-Jensen

Jesper Rønn-Jensen — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 09:08:35 +0000

@Jeet i follow your thoughts but the repositories I tested with above actually shows a disk usage reduction.

The biggest SVN repository above had more than 16,000 commits and the Git version was 40% smaller even though it contained the entire project history.

So even though that the svn repositories here are only snapshots in time (the history remains on the server), there is a significant difference.

BTW, the Git repos also only contains differences between each revision.

By: Jeet

Jeet — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 09:46:16 +0000

I am not entirely sure about git reducing the disk usage, since it has to keep ‘whole’ copies of the commits, I am inclined to think that total size required by a well used git repository would be higher than svn/cvs repository that will only keep differences.

Might try something locally before I can conclude.. but yeah, I have switched to git already :))