Re: arbitrary memory allocation

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2015 at 05:06:35AM +0100, ytrezq@sdf-eu.org wrote:

> First, something I still don t understand, should I always ulimit ram
> usage for security purposes when I m manage a public server?

You didn't define "public" here. For serving fetches, the memory tends
to be fairly bounded and dependent on the repo you're serving. For
accepting pushes, it's trivial to convince the server to allocate a lot
of memory (you can send an unbounded set of ref updates, or you can
simply send a 50GB object that compresses down to a tiny size).

Git does not have any internal memory controls, and will generally rely
on malloc() to tell it when it is not being reasonable. I'd suggest
using OS-level memory controls like cgroups if you're hosting something
public.

-Peff