Certain types of repository resources can be quite large, requiring excessive processing on GitHub. Because of this, limits are set to ensure requests complete in a reasonable amount of time.
Most of the limits below affect both GitHub and the API.
GitHub displays formatted previews of some files, such as Markdown and Mermaid diagrams. GitHub always attempts to render these previews if the files are small (generally less than 2 MB), but more complex files may time out and either fall back to plain text or not be displayed at all. These files are always available in their raw formats, which are served through
raw.githubusercontent.com
; for example,
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/octocat/Spoon-Knife/master/index.html
. Click the
Raw
button to get the raw URL for a file.
Because diffs can become very large, we impose these limits on diffs for commits, pull requests, and compare views:
- In a pull request, no total diff may exceed
20,000 lines that you can load
or
1 MB
of raw diff data.
- No single file's diff may exceed
20,000 lines that you can load
or
500 KB
of raw diff data.
Four hundred lines
and
20 KB
are automatically loaded for a single file.
- The maximum number of files in a single diff is limited to
300
.
- The maximum number of renderable files (such as images, PDFs, and GeoJSON files) in a single diff is limited to
25
.
Some portions of a limited diff may be displayed, but anything exceeding the limit is not shown.
The compare view and pull requests pages display a list of commits between the
base
and
head
revisions. These lists are limited to
250
commits. If they exceed that limit, a note indicates that additional commits are present (but they're not shown).
The maximum count of commits displayed on the Commits tab of Github.com is
10,000
. Use other tools such as
git rev-list --count mybranch
to count and enumerate a high volume of commits when needed.
