TLDR Tech / DevOps
Reducing our monorepo size to improve developer velocity
Dropbox slashed its massive server monorepo from 87GB to 20GB (a 77% reduction) and cut clone times from over an hour to under 15 minutes by working with GitHub to optimize how Git's compression algorithm handled their internationalization files. The bloat wasn't from large files or excess code, but from a quirky interaction between Git's default compression heuristic (which only looks at the last 16 characters of file paths) and Dropbox's directory structure, causing translation updates to generate inefficiently large delta comparisons across different language files.
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