Git packfiles use delta compression, storing only the diff when a 10MB file changes by one line, while the objects table stores each version in full. A file modified 100 times takes about 1GB in Postgres versus maybe 50MB in a packfile. Postgres does TOAST and compress large values, but that’s compressing individual objects in isolation, not delta-compressing across versions the way packfiles do, so the storage overhead is real. A delta-compression layer that periodically repacks objects within Postgres, or offloads large blobs to S3 the way LFS does, is a natural next step. For most repositories it still won’t matter since the median repo is small and disk is cheap, and GitHub’s Spokes system made a similar trade-off years ago, storing three full uncompressed copies of every repository across data centres because redundancy and operational simplicity beat storage efficiency even at hundreds of exabytes.
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Nature, Published online: 25 February 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-025-10095-x