git is very very slow when tracking large binary files

Question

My project is six months old and git is very very slow. We track around 30 files which are of size 5 MB to 50 MB. Those are binary files and we keep them in git. I believe those files are making git slow.

Is there a way to kill all files of size > 5MB from the repository. I know I would lose all of these files and that is okay with me.

Ideally I would like a command that would list all the big files ( > 5MB) . I can see the list and then I say okay go ahead and delete those files and make git faster.

I should mention that git is slow not only on my machine but deploying the app on staging environment is now taking around 3 hours.

So the fix should be something that will affect the server and not only the users of repository.

Answer 1

Do you garbage collect?

git gc

This makes a significant difference in speed, even for small repos.