Re: "malloc failed"

[David Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>]

on Wed Jan 28 2009, David Abrahams <dave-AT-boostpro.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:02:25 -0500, Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:
>> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 10:04:42AM -0500, David Abrahams wrote:
>> 
>>> I've been abusing Git for a purpose it wasn't intended to serve:
>>> archiving a large number of files with many duplicates and
>>> near-duplicates.  Every once in a while, when trying to do something
>>> really big, it tells me "malloc failed" and bails out (I think it's
>>> during "git add" but because of the way I issued the commands I can't
>>> tell: it could have been a commit or a gc).  This is on a 64-bit linux
>>> machine with 8G of ram and plenty of swap space, so I'm surprised.
>>> 
>>> Git is doing an amazing job at archiving and compressing all this stuff
>>> I'm putting in it, but I have to do it a wee bit at a time or it craps
>>> out.  Bug?
>> 
>> How big is the repository? How big are the biggest files? I have a
>> 3.5G repo with files ranging from a few bytes to about 180M. I've never
>> run into malloc problems or gone into swap on my measly 1G box.
>> How does your dataset compare?
>
> I'll try to do some research.  Gotta go pick up my boy now...

Well, moving the 2.6G .dar backup binary out of the fileset seems to
have helped a little, not surprisingly :-P

I don't know whether anyone on this list should care about that failure
given the level of abuse I'm inflicting on Git, but keep in mind that
the system *does* have 8G of memory.  Conclude what you will from that,
I suppose!

-- 
Dave Abrahams
BoostPro Computing
http://www.boostpro.com