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.
Text limits
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.
Diff limits
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.
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).
The maximum count of commits displayed on the Commits tab is 10,000. Use other tools such as git rev-list --count mybranch to count and enumerate a high volume of commits when needed.
Organization Limits
If a repository owner exceeds 100,000 repositories, some UI experiences and API functionality may be degraded. For more information, see "About repositories."