GoKawiilExperiment shows Git commits consume kilobytes of disk space per small change
A developer measured Git repository size changes using du and dc, finding an empty .git directory takes about 64KB, while adding 250 tiny files and committing them added roughly 47KB. A single-character edit to one file followed by a commit added about 17KB to the repository, despite the actual content change being only a few bytes.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The findings illustrate that Git's object storage model allocates disk space in fixed-size blocks per object directory, meaning even trivial text edits can appear to cost far more storage than the literal byte-level change would suggest. This could matter for developers reasoning about repository size growth over many small commits, though the experiment does not account for Git's later pack-file compression which typically reduces long-term storage overhead.
- An empty Git repository occupies about 64KB on disk by default.
- Committing 250 small files added roughly 47KB to the repository size.
- A one-character file change followed by a commit added about 17KB, far more than the literal edit size.
Source: ratfactor.com, 2026-10-09
Published there as: “How big is a Git commit?”
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