Reducing our monorepo size to improve developer velocity
Mar 25, 2026Ishan Mishra

Summary
This post details how Dropbox reduced its monorepo size from 87GB to 20GB by identifying and addressing an issue with Git's delta compression heuristic, which was inefficiently packing internationalization files due to their directory structure. By working with GitHub to implement a more aggressive repack strategy with tuned parameters, they significantly improved clone times and reduced operational risk.
More from the Magic Pocket Storage Efficiency trail
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- Improving storage efficiency in Magic Pocket, our immutable blob store
- Increasing Magic Pocket write throughput by removing our SSD cache disks
- Future-proofing our metadata stack with Panda, a scalable key-value store
- Everything in its write place: Cloud storage abstraction with Object Store