How to handle big repositories with git

Shallow clone

Clone a repository keeping only the latest n commits of history. You can properly pull and push to repositories even from a shallow clone.

git clone --depth 1 remote-url

Clone only one branch

You can also limit the amount of history you clone by cloning a single branch

git clone URL --branch branch_name --single-branch [folder]

Sparse checkout

Original StackOverflow answer

mkdir <repo>
cd <repo>
git init
git remote add -f origin <url>
git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo "some/dir/" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
echo "another/sub/tree" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
git pull origin master

Another way:

git clone

git config core.sparsecheckout true

echo src/ > .git/info/sparse-checkout

git read-tree -m -u HEAD

Sparse checkout + shallow clone

Original StackOverflow answer

git init <repo>
cd <repo>
git remote add origin <url>
git config core.sparsecheckout true
echo "src/*" >> .git/info/sparse-checkout
git pull --depth=1 origin master

Disable delta compression for binary files

Original discussion

Configure a .gitattributes file as such:

*.jpg  binary -delta
*.png  binary -delta
*.psd  binary -delta

... and so on

More detailed story from Atlassian blog

Premature optimization

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Knuth, "Structured Programming with Goto Statements". Computing Surveys 6:4 (December 1974), pp. 261–301, §1.