phacility/phabricator · error · Exception

The raw diff you have submitted is too large to parse

Error message

The raw diff you have submitted is too large to parse (it affects more than %s paths and hunks).

What it means

differential.createrawdiff bounds the work needed to persist a raw diff: it sums 1 + hunk count over every changeset in the parsed diff and rejects the call with a plain Exception when that total exceeds a hard-coded limit of 10000. The message reads 'The raw diff you have submitted is too large to parse (it affects more than %s paths and hunks).'.

Solutions

1. Narrow the diff to the paths that matter: git diff -- <paths>, and exclude vendored/generated files
2. Split the change into several smaller diffs/revisions if the work is genuinely that large
3. Pre-compute the same size metric client-side (sum of 1 + hunks per path) and refuse to submit past 10000
4. Note the limit is hard-coded server-side; there is no configuration to raise it - reduce the diff instead

Example fix

# before
git diff master...feature | head -c 100M > /tmp/huge.diff
# then submit /tmp/huge.diff -> rejected

# after
git diff master...feature -- ':!vendor' ':!*.min.js' > /tmp/d.diff
# submit /tmp/d.diff

// Mirror the server metric: 1 + hunks per path, limit 10000.
$size = 0;
foreach ($parsed_changes as $change) {
  $size += 1 + count(idx($change, 'hunks', array()));
}
if ($size > 10000) {
  throw new RuntimeException('Diff too large: '.$size.' paths+hunks; narrow it');
}

try {
  $client->callMethodSynchronous('differential.createrawdiff', $params);
} catch (ConduitClientException $ex) {
  if (strpos($ex->getMessage(), 'too large to parse') !== false) {
    // reduce scope (exclude paths) and resubmit once
  } else {
    throw $ex;
  }
}

When it happens

Trigger: Submitting a raw diff that touches more than 10000 combined paths and hunks - whole-tree or monorepo diffs, vendored/generated code included, or a diff of many files each with several hunks.

Common situations: Developers running tools like 'git diff HEAD~50' on huge trees; CI jobs diffing with vendored dependencies not excluded; diffs containing minimized or lock-generated files with many hunks.

Related errors

• ERR-BAD-DIFF
• ERR_BAD_DIFF
• ERR_BAD_DIFF
• Field "changes" must be non-empty.
• Field "raw_diff" must be non-empty.

AI-assisted analysis of phacility/phabricator@5720a38cfe (2026-08-21). Data as JSON: /api/errors/6e3cf4fd6d7ad7d8. Report an issue: GitHub.

Appendix: source

Thrown at src/applications/differential/conduit/DifferentialCreateRawDiffConduitAPIMethod.php:59

          pht('No such repository "%s"!', $repository_phid));
      }
    }

    $parser = new ArcanistDiffParser();
    $changes = $parser->parseDiff($raw_diff);
    $diff = DifferentialDiff::newFromRawChanges($viewer, $changes);

    // We're bounded by doing INSERTs for all the hunks and changesets, so
    // estimate the number of inserts we'll require.
    $size = 0;
    foreach ($diff->getChangesets() as $changeset) {
      $hunks = $changeset->getHunks();
      $size += 1 + count($hunks);
    }

    $raw_limit = 10000;
    if ($size > $raw_limit) {
      throw new Exception(
        pht(
          'The raw diff you have submitted is too large to parse (it affects '.
          'more than %s paths and hunks).',
          new PhutilNumber($raw_limit)));
    }

    $diff_data_dict = array(
      'creationMethod' => 'web',
      'authorPHID' => $viewer->getPHID(),
      'repositoryPHID' => $repository_phid,
      'lintStatus' => DifferentialLintStatus::LINT_SKIP,
      'unitStatus' => DifferentialUnitStatus::UNIT_SKIP,
    );

    $xactions = array(
      id(new DifferentialDiffTransaction())
        ->setTransactionType(DifferentialDiffTransaction::TYPE_DIFF_CREATE)
        ->setNewValue($diff_data_dict),

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