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Article version: Enterprise Server 2.17

Limits for viewing content and diffs in a repository

Certain types of resources can be quite large, requiring excessive processing on GitHub Enterprise. Because of this, limits are set to ensure requests complete in a reasonable amount of time.

In this article

Most of the limits below affect both GitHub Enterprise and the API.

Text limits

Text files over 1 MB are always displayed as plain text. Code is not syntax highlighted, and prose files are not converted to HTML (such as Markdown, AsciiDoc, etc.).

Text files over 5 MB are only available through their raw URLs, which are served through [hostname]/user/repo/raw; for example, https://[hostname]/user/repo/raw/octocat/Spoon-Knife/master/index.html. Click the Raw button to get the raw URL for a file.

Diff limits

Because diffs can become very large, we impose these limits on diffs for commits, pull requests, and compare views:

  • No single file's diff may exceed 20,000 lines that you can load or 1 MB 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 3,000.
  • 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.

Commit listings limits

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).

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