Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Your comment was at the top so I continued to read expecting to find a bunch of ignorant group think about how git is awesome and Facebook is dumb, but that's not really what's going on down below.

I don't know what facebook's use case is, so I have no idea if their repositories are optimally structured. However, I've used git on a very large repository and ran into some of the same performance issues that they did (30+ seconds to run git status), so I don't think it's terribly hard to imagine they're in a similar situation.

What we did to solve it is exactly what you're excoriating the people below for suggesting: we split the repos and used other tools to manage multiple git repos, 'Repo' in some situations, git submodules in others.

However, we moved to that workflow mainly because it had a number of other advantages, not just because it made day-to-day git operations faster.

I hope git gets faster, some of the performance problems described are things we saw too, but things are always more complicated and I see nothing below that looks like the knee-jerk ignorant consensus you're describing.

Sometimes the answer to "it hurts when I do this" is "don't do that... because there's other ways to solve the same issue that work better for a number of other reasons and we haven't bothered fixing that particular one because most of the time the other way works better anyway."



On a simliar note, I've heard there of people who would hit the limit on fortran files, so they put every variable into a function call to the next file, which itself contained one function and a function call to the next file after that (if necessary).

Making stuff modular is often a good idea.


Cellular, modular, and interactive-odular!


It is intuitively obvious that it is better to be rich and healthy than poor and ill. Sadly, the reality choices are neither. And you can not just split a repo. Hearing some ideas for that case would have been interesting.

Solving a scaling problem by splitting it is, well, obvious.

And, yes, I also ran github on a couple of projects at $work and the issues are real, seen them.

So, if it hurts when I try to use git - the answer will be don't use git... But the conveniences are so tempting...




Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: