Large repos bring their own problems, and results in some design decisions accordingly. For example, Visual Studio itself is 5M+ files and this affected some of the the initial design decisions (Server side workspaces, for this example) when developing TFS 2005 (the first version) [1]. That decision suits MS but not the small to medium clients well. So they're now alternating that design with client side workspaces.

It's not wise to offer Facebook to split the repository. Looks like it's time to improve the tool.

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/08/02/version-co...