github does not display commit diff, too large

Question

Instead of the commit diff -- concerning one of my commits -- github just tells me:

Sorry, this diff is taking too long to generate.
It may be too large to display on GitHub.

If I append .patch to the end of the URL, I get the following message:

error: too big or took too long to generate

I admit that the diff size is 3.6 millon lines (74MB) -- verified at command line using git diff.

But if I understand well https://github.blog/2016-12-06-how-we-made-diff-pages-3x-faster tells us (towards the end of the post) that:

Overall, the effective limits we enforce for the entire diff became:

    Up to 3,000 files.
    Up to 60,000,000 lines (not loaded automatically).
    Up to 3GB of diff text (also not loaded automatically).

which is quite acceptable and far more than I need.

Any idea how can I get this commit diff on github?

Answer 1

Well, that blog post is of December 6, 2016, so might be outdated.

As of now, according to GitHub Help the diff limits are

Because diffs can become very large, we impose these limits on diffs for commits, pull requests, and compare views:

• No single file's diff may exceed 20,000 lines that you can load or 1 MB of raw diff data. Four hundred lines and 20 KB are automatically loaded for a single file.
• The maximum number of files in a single diff is limited to 3,000.
• The maximum number of renderable files (such as images, PDFs, and GeoJSON files) in a single diff is limited to 25.

Some portions of a limited diff may be displayed, but anything exceeding the limit is not shown.

So if your diff numbers don't fall below the specified limits, I don't think you can view that on GitHub.com