[[!meta title="unreachable git objects"]]

Hi,

I am been seeing quite big overheads using `git-annex`.  Is this is normal?

The `.git/objects` folder is explosive in my system, often being larger
than the content watched by git-annex.  Here's the actual statistics
of my git-annex folders, where the fourth column is calculated as col3/(col2-col3).

[[!table  data="""
folder,size,size .git,relative size
conf.annex,777536,720100,12.537433
doc.annex,20351624,11260204,1.2385528
images.annex,817064,435580,1.1418041
misc.annex,803328,572476,2.4798399
music.annex,23756116,9192740,0.63122314"""]]

That is, four of five repos require more space for the `.git` folder than the actual files.  Most of this comes from the `objects` folder.  

Number of files:

[[!table data="""
folder,no. files,no files .git,relative size
conf.annex,11350,9539,5.2672557
doc.annex,84954,66824,3.6858246
images.annex,92787,91285,60.775632
misc.annex,95461,95160,316.14618
music.annex,16414,13520,4.6717346
"""]]


I use the assistant web interface, and direct
mode.  I use two laptops running Linux that are synchronized
directly over LAN at home or via a transfer repo on a ssh server
where git-annex is installed.  The latter is set up using the web interface and the gcrypt repo.
[Mostly, the transfer repo isn't working
and I often end up with only symlinks on the computer where I did not edit the file in question, 
but this is probably unrelated.]

I have previously tried to fix it using `git gc` or `git annex forget`, but it doesn't seem to significantly reduce the sizes, and what it helps isn't persistent.

Is this kind of 'overhead' something that one must accept when using
`git-annex` or do such numbers indicate that something is wrong?

Thanks.
