How to find/identify large commits in git history?

🚀 A blazingly fast shell one-liner 🚀

This shell script displays all blob objects in the repository, sorted from smallest to largest.

For my sample repo, it ran about 100 times faster than the other ones found here.
On my trusty Athlon II X4 system, it handles the Linux Kernel repository with its 5.6 million objects in just over a minute.

The Base Script

git rev-list --objects --all |
  git cat-file --batch-check='%(objecttype) %(objectname) %(objectsize) %(rest)' |
  sed -n 's/^blob //p' |
  sort --numeric-sort --key=2 |
  cut -c 1-12,41- |
  $(command -v gnumfmt || echo numfmt) --field=2 --to=iec-i --suffix=B --padding=7 --round=nearest

When you run above code, you will get nice human-readable output like this:

...
0d99bb931299  530KiB path/to/some-image.jpg
2ba44098e28f   12MiB path/to/hires-image.png
bd1741ddce0d   63MiB path/to/some-video-1080p.mp4

macOS users: Since numfmt is not available on macOS, you can either omit the last line and deal with raw byte sizes or brew install coreutils.

Filtering

To achieve further filtering, insert any of the following lines before the sort line.

To exclude files that are present in HEAD, insert the following line:

grep -vF --file=<(git ls-tree -r HEAD | awk '{print $3}') |

To show only files exceeding given size (e.g. 1 MiB = 2²⁰ B), insert the following line:

awk '$2 >= 2^20' |

Output for Computers

To generate output that's more suitable for further processing by computers, omit the last two lines of the base script. They do all the formatting. This will leave you with something like this:

...
0d99bb93129939b72069df14af0d0dbda7eb6dba 542455 path/to/some-image.jpg
2ba44098e28f8f66bac5e21210c2774085d2319b 12446815 path/to/hires-image.png
bd1741ddce0d07b72ccf69ed281e09bf8a2d0b2f 65183843 path/to/some-video-1080p.mp4

---

Appendix

File Removal

For the actual file removal, check out this SO question on the topic.

Understanding the meaning of the displayed file size

What this script displays is the size each file would have in the working directory. If you want to see how much space a file occupies if not checked out, you can use %(objectsize:disk) instead of %(objectsize). However, mind that this metric also has its caveats, as is mentioned in the documentation.

More sophisticated size statistics

Sometimes a list of big files is just not enough to find out what the problem is. You would not spot directories or branches containing humongous numbers of small files, for example.

So if the script here does not cut it for you (and you have a decently recent version of git), look into git-filter-repo --analyze or git rev-list --disk-usage (examples).

I've found this script very useful in the past for finding large (and non-obvious) objects in a git repository:

• http://stubbisms.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/git-script-to-show-largest-pack-objects-and-trim-your-waist-line/

---

#!/bin/bash
#set -x 
 
# Shows you the largest objects in your repo's pack file.
# Written for osx.
#
# @see https://stubbisms.wordpress.com/2009/07/10/git-script-to-show-largest-pack-objects-and-trim-your-waist-line/
# @author Antony Stubbs
 
# set the internal field separator to line break, so that we can iterate easily over the verify-pack output
IFS=$'\n';
 
# list all objects including their size, sort by size, take top 10
objects=`git verify-pack -v .git/objects/pack/pack-*.idx | grep -v chain | sort -k3nr | head`
 
echo "All sizes are in kB's. The pack column is the size of the object, compressed, inside the pack file."
 
output="size,pack,SHA,location"
allObjects=`git rev-list --all --objects`
for y in $objects
do
    # extract the size in bytes
    size=$((`echo $y | cut -f 5 -d ' '`/1024))
    # extract the compressed size in bytes
    compressedSize=$((`echo $y | cut -f 6 -d ' '`/1024))
    # extract the SHA
    sha=`echo $y | cut -f 1 -d ' '`
    # find the objects location in the repository tree
    other=`echo "${allObjects}" | grep $sha`
    #lineBreak=`echo -e "\n"`
    output="${output}\n${size},${compressedSize},${other}"
done
 
echo -e $output | column -t -s ', '

---

That will give you the object name (SHA1sum) of the blob, and then you can use a script like this one:

• Which commit has this blob?

... to find the commit that points to each of those blobs.

I've found a one-liner solution on ETH Zurich Department of Physics wiki page (close to the end of that page). Just do a git gc to remove stale junk, and then

git rev-list --objects --all \
  | grep "$(git verify-pack -v .git/objects/pack/*.idx \
           | sort -k 3 -n \
           | tail -10 \
           | awk '{print$1}')"

will give you the 10 largest files in the repository.

There's also a lazier solution now available, GitExtensions now has a plugin that does this in UI (and handles history rewrites as well).