I was thinking about this from the perspective of a server like Gitea. What I meant by 'read the repo' is retrieve objects like commits to display them to the u

I was thinking about this from the perspective of a server like Gitea. What I meant by 'read the repo' is retrieve objects like commits to display them to the user. So on the server you should only ever have packfiles, and in order to efficiently read packfiles you read the index (idx) file. I'm not positive, but I think that this file needs to be read in its entirety in order to access an object. Even if you don't have to read the whole file, it's probably best because you generally read more than one object at a time (e.g. if you display a list of files in HEAD you read the commit pointed to by HEAD, read its tree, and read all of the blobs in its tree). My thought with using loose files rather than packfiles is that you wouldn't suffer the memory overhead of lookup, you just open the file at `objects/some/object` and parse it. The real solution here is probably to get a server with more RAM and cache repositories. I'd be interested to hear what GitHub does.