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by dfox 4913 days ago
One reason might be that bash reads this whole file into memory on interactive startup and rewrites it completely when shutting down.
1 comments

I second this, I think it is good practice to rotate the history file manually when it reaches several MBs. (Using zsh, the main symptoms of a large history file is sluggishness when using ^R and a lag of a few tenths of a second when closing a terminal.)
For now I don't feel any annoyance, the shell startup is instantaneous and it closes instantaneously as well. If I'm starting to feel a slow down I might rotate the log, but I guess that's not happening soon.