What are the file limits in Git (number and size)?

Question

Does anyone know what are the Git limits for number of files and size of files?

Answer 1

Back in Feb 2012, there was a very interesting thread on the Git mailing list from Joshua Redstone, a Facebook software engineer testing Git on a huge test repository:

The test repo has 4 million commits, linear history and about 1.3 million files.

Tests that were run show that for such a repo Git is unusable (cold operation lasting minutes), but this may change in the future. Basically the performance is penalized by the number of stat() calls to the kernel FS module, so it will depend on the number of files in the repo, and the FS caching efficiency. See also this Gist for further discussion.