Do you ever have discussions with your colleagues about how many Git hash digits should be used to reference Git commits within your Git repository?

The probability of a commit hash collision, of course, depends on the number of digits you track and the number of commits you expect. (Note: I’m talking about colliding on the first few digits you track, not the entire SHA1 hash of 40 hex digits).

I used to use 5 digits, but now I use 6. Some people caution that I should be using 7. So I decided to crank the data. I used the standard formula for choosing r items from n items without replacement. I’d display it here, but I don’t know how to display math formulas on web pages.

If you’re expecting a small project at around 500 commits, the diagram below illustrates the probability of a commit collision using 4-, 5-, 6-, and 7-hex digit hash references.

You can see that even for fewer than 100 commits, the 4-hex-digit scheme has a significant probability of a collision. You may be OK with 5 hex-digits for less than 100.

If you’re expecting closer to 1,000 commits, you’ll definitely want more than 5 hex digits. And even for 6 digits the likelihood of a collision is not trivial.

We can see the 6- and 7-digit data better if we remove the 5-digit data.

We can see the 6-digit labels approaching a 3% chance of at least one collision before reaching 1,000 commits. A 7-digit label still has less than a quarter of a percent.

These graphs are great fun. I’ll leave you with a final one that shows the probability of at least one collision for up to 10,000 commits!

Even for 7-digits the collision likelihood approaches 18%.