A nice middle ground would be if I could specify to show some branches by default—for example, just autoclose branches—and to have others hidden unless specifically requested.

I'd be inclined to show N branches, for some small value of N like 3 or 5 or 10, with a link to "Show 1,695 more branches which contain this commit...".

Preferentially choosing autoclose branches to order first in that N might be desirable, although picking the first N that the VCS gives us may be faster or more scalable (e.g., if you had 170,000 instead of 1,700, the cost to select the "good" ones might not be worth paying).

In T9562#140172, @epriestley wrote:

I'd be inclined to show N branches, for some small value of N like 3 or 5 or 10, with a link to "Show 1,695 more branches which contain this commit...".

Preferentially choosing autoclose branches to order first in that N might be desirable, although picking the first N that the VCS gives us may be faster or more scalable (e.g., if you had 170,000 instead of 1,700, the cost to select the "good" ones might not be worth paying).

I think limiting to a small value by default and providing the option to show more would work well in this case, since there are probably some times when I would want to see all of the branches, but, for the most part, showing the full list isn't useful. It'd also be nice to limit the initial query to a small number, as you suggest, to avoid querying for the full list of branches in the majority of cases, when I wouldn't be looking at them anyway.

I want to see stuffs like this too - this commit is messy, isn't it?

Maybe show default branch and first few branches and hide all others?