A flaw in the way Git calculates the difference between versions of the same file can bloat repositories by many times, causing performance issues and consuming excessive storage.

Microsoft senior engineer Jonathan Creamer has posted about a very large JavaScript Git repository with which his team work – a monorepo (a single repository which stores multiple related projects). In this case there are over 1,000 monthly active users and around 20 million lines of code. Cloning the repository consumed 178GB of disk space, Creamer reports – more space than one would expect.