I am writing a script that clones a large git repository, modifies a few files and pushes the changes back to the remote. It needs to run as fast as possible.
Right now, it takes about 10 minutes to clone the repository. The resulting folder is roughly 3GB large, 50% of which is the .git folder. I tried cloning the repository with --depth=1, but the result is basically identical.
I also tried running git fetch origin --depth=1, which downloads a .git folder of about 100MB. However, when I checkout the branch, it then gets back to 3GB.
Why does my .git folder have the same size with and without --depth=1? Does it mean that my history is basically small, and the size comes from large binary files, etc?
Note 1: This workspace is using git lfs. I don't know if that has an impact or not.
Note 2: I intend on experimenting with partial clones in the near future. It looks like it could solve my problem, since I know exactly which files I need to modify.