"git fsck" fails on malloc of 80 G

[worley@alum.mit.edu (Dale R. Worley)]

I have a large repository (17 GiB of disk used), although no single
file in the repository is over 1 GiB.  (I have pack.packSizeLimit set
to "1g".)  I don't know how many files are in the repository, but it
shouldn't exceed several tens of commits each containing several tens
of thousands of files.

Due to Git crashing while performing an operation, I want to verify
that the repository is consistent.  However, when I run "git fsck" it
fails, apparently because it is trying to allocate 80 G of memory.  (I
can still do adds, commits, etc.)

# git fsck
Checking object directories: 100% (256/256), done.
fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed (tried to allocate 80530636801 bytes)
#

I don't know if this is due to an outright bug or not.  But it seems
to me that "git fsck" should not need to allocate any more memory than
the size (1 GiB) of a single pack file.  And given its purpose, "git
fsck" should be one of the *most* robust Git tools!

Dale