Yeah learned this the hard way.
this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Special shout out to the person who committed a gigabyte memory dump a few years ago. Even with a shallow clone, it's pretty darn slow now.
We can't rewrite history to remove it since other things rely on the commit IDs not changing.
Oh well.
Why can't you just remove the file?
Because the git history will still keep it completely to be able to restore it once you go to a commit in which it wasn't deleted.
And you cannot tell git to completely forget about it as that requires a rewrite of history and this changes all commit hashes which are touched (and any future ones).