Unreal Engine with Git LFS is worth it?

Jodev
Tue, 19 Dec 2023 02:07:03 +0000
Programming & Scripting

Hello, I did some tests with Git LFS to illustrate with numbers the difference between using it or not.

I created two projects in the unreal engine, one using LFS and the other not.

I’m using the unreal engine 5 with the “ThirdPerson” template in c++, with nothing else added, just the pure template.

In the first print I show the repository that is using LFS, its size on github was only 84kb,
since the binary files are stored elsewhere, and there we only have the pointers generated by LFS.

In the second print I show the size of my storage (the other place I mentioned above, where they are actually stored
my project’s binary files)

In other words… LFS stored 1010Mb of binaries in another location (my storage) and my github repository did not store it
these files, only stored the pointers that point to these files, leaving this remote repository with
just an incredible 84kb

In the third print I show my second project that is not using LFS, I am using the same template (ThirdPerson)
and look at the absurd difference in size… The remote repository was left with 917Mb, since this time, it is actually
storing the binaries and not pointers, as I’m not using LFS.

This means that using LFS drastically reduces the size of your remote repository, making it possible to perform
operations such as pulls, clones, etc., much faster and making the project much lighter

But not everything is perfect. This “Storage” I mentioned has a limit of 1gb on github, unless you choose to
pay for more packages and increase this space, and in addition to storage, we have “Bandwidth”, which is used when pulling from the repository,
In other words, you can perform up to 1GB of pulls from that project per month, since this number is reset every month.
On the other hand, “Storage” is fixed and never resets, and is deducted per github account and not per repository, if
If you spend a total of 1GB making pushes using LFS, you will have to buy more packages to continue using this tool…

And you can already see that just the “ThirdPerson” template from Unreal Engine 5 already cost 99% of that 1GB.
In other words, it is practically impossible to use LFS on github in a real project without having to pay for more packages, since just the pure template already costs 99% of this resource (almost 1gb).

So the discussion remains, is it worth paying for more packages to use LFS in an Unreal project in scenarios where you just want to version your project for the record, and
No one else will be doing pulls and contributing besides you?

3 posts - 3 participants