Re: cloning the linxu kernel repo at a VPS with small RAM

[Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org>]

Hello Toralf,

On 2024-02-08 18:32, Toralf Förster wrote:
> Situation:
> 
> The command
>     git clone
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux.git
> fails at a virtual server with about 2 GiB RAM under a recent Debian
> bookworm with git 2.39.2. What works for me:
>       git clone --depth=1
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable
>       cd ./linux
>       git config gc.auto 0
>       git config pack.threads 1
>       git fetch --tags
> as seen in [1].
> 
> Q:
> I do wonder if Git could automatically try to deal with only 1.5 GiB
> available RAM?

Here's an excerpt from my ~/.bashrc, which sets the things up
on my Pinebook Pro laptop with an RK3399 SoC and 4 GB of RAM,
which is also thermally constrained:

# Missing nproc(1) is handled properly
REASONABLE_THREADS=$(nproc 2> /dev/null || echo 1)
REASONABLE_THREADS=$((${REASONABLE_THREADS} / 2))
((${REASONABLE_THREADS} == 0)) && REASONABLE_THREADS=1

export GIT_CONFIG_COUNT=3
export GIT_CONFIG_KEY_0='grep.threads'
export GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_0=${REASONABLE_THREADS}
export GIT_CONFIG_KEY_1='index.threads'
export GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_1=${REASONABLE_THREADS}
export GIT_CONFIG_KEY_2='pack.threads'
export GIT_CONFIG_VALUE_2=${REASONABLE_THREADS}

export ZSTD_NBTHREADS=${REASONABLE_THREADS}
unset REASONABLE_THREADS

Obviously, this does a bit more than configuring git only.

Perhaps modifying this to additionally take the amount of RAM
into the calculation of REASONABLE_THREADS could be a solution
for your use case?