[[Image(git-bigfiles.png, right, nolink)]]
= git-bigfiles - Git for big files =

'''git-bigfiles''' is our fork of [http://git-scm.com/ Git]. It has two goals:

 * make life bearable for people using Git on projects hosting very large files (hundreds of megabytes)
 * merge back as many changes as possible into upstream Git

== Features ==

'''git-bigfiles''' already features the following fixes:

 * '''config''': add `core.bigFileThreshold` option to treat files larger than this value as big files
 * '''git-p4''': fix poor string building performance when importing big files (git-p4 is now only marginally faster on Linux but 4 to 10 times faster on Win32)
 * '''fast-import''': avoid computing deltas on big files and deflate them on-the-fly (fast-import is now twice as fast and uses 3.7 times less memory with big files)

== Results ==

Git `fast-import` memory usage and running time when importing a repository with binary files up to 150 MiB:

[[Image(fast-import-memory.png, 200px)]]

== Development ==

git-bigfiles development is centralised in a `repo.or.cz` Git repository.

Clone the repository:

{{{
git clone git://repo.or.cz/git/git-bigfiles.git
}}}

If you already have a working copy of upstream git, you may save a lot of bandwidth by doing:

{{{
git clone git://repo.or.cz/git/git-bigfiles.git --reference /path/to/git/
}}}

The main Git repository is constantly merged into git-bigfiles. See the [http://repo.or.cz/w/git/git-bigfiles.git git-bigfiles] repository on [http://repo.or.cz/ repo.or.cz].

== To do ==

The following commands are real memory hogs with big files:

 * `git diff-tree --stat --summary -M <sha1> HEAD`
 * `git gc` (as called by `git merge`) fails with ''warning: suboptimal pack - out of memory''

== Readings ==

 * 2006/02/08: Linus on [http://kerneltrap.org/mailarchive/git/2006/2/8/200594 Handling large files with GIT]