Git vs SVN in sizes – checkout or clone?

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The Cherokee project (webserver) uses subversion “SVN” for versioning its code. I had it checked out on my HDD and I updated it again today. Why not check it out as Git, I thought.

And as I did that, and it took very long, I thought: why not compare checkout sizes? Result: Awesomeness ofc:

A svn checkout of the recent revision 5978 has a size of 27.2 MB (38.4 on disk).

A git checkout (rather a repository clone) with all revisions and branches is 72 MB (94.2 on disk).

When working with Git objects may become loose (“git gui” will tell you, you can also use commands to check manually). Compressing (or rather, garbage-collecting) the git repository, its size was decreased to now 53.8 MB (58 on disk).

Shall we multiply 5978 by 38? 227164! (Although depending on your interpretation this calculation may not be so meaningful.)

Now, I don’t know the size of the remote repository, but from a checking-out devs perspective alone git is a big plus here. All diffs, merges, branching, history-ing, everything can be done locally now, without fetching data from the repository again and having to wait for it to download. You will still push and pull commits, but you will not have to wait for every history-peek.