Repository size increased after git filter-repo cleanup - need garbage collection

[Osama Jarrar]

Hello,

I recently performed a repository cleanup using git filter-repo to remove build artifacts (bin/, obj/, packages/, etc.) from our repository history. The cleanup was successful - fresh clones are now ~941MB instead of the previous ~1.8GB.

However, the Bitbucket Cloud repository size has increased from 4GB to 11.5GB instead of decreasing.

What I did:

1. Ran git filter-repo --invert-paths to remove build artifacts from all branches
2. Force-pushed all cleaned branches to Bitbucket Cloud
3. Deleted all old tags from remote
4. Created new tags on the cleaned commits
5. Force-pushed tags

Current situation:

• Fresh clones: ~941MB ✅ (correct size)
• git ls-remote shows only cleaned refs ✅
• Bitbucket UI repository size: 11.5GB ❌ (should be ~1GB)

It appears Bitbucket is retaining both the old unreferenced objects (~4GB) and the new filtered objects (~941MB), totaling 11.5GB.

Question: How can I trigger garbage collection on Bitbucket Cloud to remove the unreferenced objects from the old history? I understand automatic GC runs periodically, but is there a way to request manual GC or speed up this process?

The old objects are no longer referenced by any branches or tags, so they should be safe to prune.

Repository: https://bitbucket.org/igotchamedia/igotcha-signage-player (private repo)

Any help would be appreciated!

[Tansu Akdeniz]

Hi @Osama Jarrar 

Welcome to the Atlassian community!

The Atlassian support team has been notified and they will reach out to you.