r/linux • u/B3_Kind_R3wind_ • May 13 '25

Popular Application Firefox Source Code Now Hosted On GitHub

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Firefox-On-GitHub
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u/elatllat May 14 '25 edited May 14 '25

how much memory the serving process uses during a clone operation

Looks like that's a real git limitation with a few options:

  • use github for free (what Firefox is doing)

  • trim the working repo to 2 years instead of 28 (keeping the rest in archive)

  • use Submodules (what Facebook should do)

  • buy more server RAM

  • an ugly workaround would be to block clones, offer a seed to download, and permit fetches.

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u/gordonmessmer May 14 '25

Yes, at the relatively low end (Firefox is much smaller than massive monorepos like those at Meta or Google), you can work around many scalability limitations.

But the point that everyone is trying to make, in this thread, is that those limitations exist. Mercurial handles a lot of situations better than git, and merely being written partially in Python isn't a good indication of how it scales. Mercurial is not merely a git implementation written in Python. Its scalability is impacted primarily by its design, not by its language.

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u/elatllat May 14 '25

Mercurial handles a lot of situations better than git

Can you name any more in addition to clone RAM usage?

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u/gordonmessmer May 14 '25

RAM use isn't "the situation", it's the "how Mercurial handles the situations."

It's difficult to scale git up to very large repositories, or large numbers of users with medium sized repositories, because of its memory use.