Git at any scale

Git’s distributed design and packfile-based storage make repository hosting difficult to scale because Git operations require random access across compressed, delta-encoded data and traversals of object graphs that perform poorly over distributed storage or networked filesystems. Early approaches, including object-level distributed stores and filesystem replication, encountered performance, reliability, and operational limits, leading GitHub and other providers to adopt the Spokes model: locally stored Git replicas synchronized through three-phase commit, which provides strong consistency but limits scaling for large monorepos, imposes a minimum replica cost for small repositories, and requires extensive management of repository locations and health. Cursor’s Continuity system retains standard Git repositories on local NVMe disks but makes an S3-compatible object store its durable source of truth through a write-ahead log, using atomic compare-and-swap operations to linearize pushes and conditional reads to ensure replicas are current. This design treats local repositories as reconstructable caches, permits flexible replica counts, uses gossip for efficient replication while validating consistency against object storage, and centralizes compaction so replicas can download compacted packs rather than recompute them. The accompanying Origin platform is presented as an effort to provide reliable, scalable Git hosting for increasing workloads from CI systems, large monorepos, and software agents while preserving Git compatibility and strong durability guarantees.

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