Git Repository Performance Simulator
Estimate Git Repository Size and Clone Duration for Better Planning
Manage large repositories effectively by estimating total repository size, download time, and clone performance. This tool aids developers, project managers, and system admins in planning resource allocation and optimizing repo management.
Git Repository Performance Simulator
Estimate your repository's clone time and size to better manage large-scale projects.
This simulator provides a high-level estimate. Actual performance depends on server load, protocol (HTTPS vs. SSH), and specific file contents.
About This Tool
The Git Repository Performance Simulator is a strategic planning tool for engineering teams dealing with large or complex codebases. As a project grows, its Git repository can become bloated with a long history and large binary files, leading to slow `git clone` operations that frustrate developers and bog down CI/CD pipelines. This tool helps you quantify that pain. Instead of just knowing a clone is "slow," you can simulate the performance by inputting key repository characteristics. By providing the number of files, average file size, estimated history size, and network speed, the simulator calculates the total download size and the expected clone duration. It's a crucial utility for making data-driven decisions about repository hygiene, such as when to adopt Git LFS, when to implement shallow clones in CI, or when to break a monolithic repository into smaller micro-repos.
How to Use This Tool
- Estimate the total number of files in your repository and the average file size.
- Estimate the size of your `.git` directory. You can find this by running `du -sh .git` in your repository's root.
- Specify your average network download speed in Mbps.
- Indicate whether your repository contains large binary files that are not managed by Git LFS.
- Click "Estimate Performance" to see the calculated total repository size and the expected time to clone.
- Review the tailored recommendations for actionable tips on how to improve your repository's performance.
In-Depth Guide
What Makes a Git Repository Slow?
A `git clone` operation is slow for two main reasons. First, the sheer **volume of data** that needs to be downloaded. This is a combination of the files in the current checkout (the working directory) and the entire compressed history of every file, which is stored in the `.git` directory. Second is the **number of objects**. Git is a content-addressable filesystem. A huge number of small files can sometimes be slower to process than a few large files due to the overhead of creating each object.
The Problem with Binary Files
Git is designed to handle text files efficiently. It can compress them and store only the "diffs" (changes) between versions. It cannot do this for binary files like images, videos, or compiled executables. When you change a binary file, Git saves a complete new copy of the entire file. If you have a 100MB asset and modify it 10 times, your repository history could contain almost 1GB of data from that file alone. This is the primary cause of repository bloat.
The Solution: Git LFS (Large File Storage)
Git LFS is an official extension for Git that solves the binary file problem. When you commit a large file tracked by LFS, it is uploaded to a separate LFS server. In its place, a tiny text pointer file is committed to your Git repository. When you clone or check out a branch, the LFS client downloads the large files corresponding to the pointers. This keeps your main repository history small and fast, while still versioning the large assets.
Speeding Up Clones with Shallow and Partial Clones
For many use cases, especially automated builds in CI/CD, you don't need the entire project history. A **Shallow Clone** (`git clone --depth <n>`) downloads only the most recent `n` commits. This drastically reduces the amount of history data transferred. For even more advanced use cases with massive monorepos, **Partial Clone** and **Sparse Checkout** are features that allow you to download only a subset of the repository's files, avoiding the need to fetch the entire project.