Similarly, I've often wondered if this is the root cause of why GitHub has become fragile of late. All of a sudden you have operations on billions of tiny files that are amplified by AI usage. And object graphs are so fragmented by nature that it's hard to e.g. prefetch a page into memory and ensure that common git operations mainly touch that page's set of objects.

And if https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporize... is to be believed even in the slightest, any unoptimized paths in Azure's filesystem abstractions could cause usage spikes to have massive splash radius.

> All of a sudden you have operations on billions of tiny files that are amplified by AI usage. And object graphs are so fragmented by nature that it's hard to e.g. prefetch a page into memory and ensure that common git operations mainly touch that page's set of objects.

In theory, that's what git's packfiles are for: loose objects get packed together into a file, and if the file is well-arranged then objects that tend to get read together will also end up getting paged-in together (see also: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/technical/p...).

GitHub in particular has spent a lot of time and effort on packing things well (e.g. https://github.blog/open-source/git/scaling-monorepo-mainten...), so I doubt that the "billions of tiny files" problem is at the root of their recent instability.