out of memory error with git push and pull

[Qingning Huo <qingninghuo@gmail.com>]

Hi All,

I tried to use git to manage my digital photos but encountered some
problems. The typical file sizes are hundreds of KB or a few MB. In
total, about 15GB data in about 10,000 files. My intention is to get
them into a git repository and cloned into a few computers. Probably I
will make some occasionally changes like editing and deleting. But I
think most of the files would stay at version one.

The setup I used is a centralized repository for pulling from and
pushing into. There is a gitweb interface for the centralised repo.

I started by creating a small repository on the server (ubuntu), and
keeps pushing data into it from a windows machine (using cygwin). Half
way through the process, (after pushed about 8GB of data), I found
that I cannot run git push any more. This is the error message I got:

$ git push
Counting objects: 621, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
fatal: Out of memory? mmap failed: Cannot allocate memory
error: pack-objects died with strange error
error: failed to push some refs to 'ssh://huo@ubuntu/mnt/share/git/photo.git'

At the same time, I found that I cannot pull from this repository either.

$ git pull
remote: Counting objects: 8088, done.
error: pack-objects died of signal 983/8057)
error: git upload-pack: git-pack-objects died with error.
fatal: git upload-pack: aborting due to possible repository corruption
on the remote side.
remote: aborting due to possible repository corruption on the remote side.
fatal: protocol error: bad pack header

[The second line is probably "died of signal 9", because it was
counting ???/8057 upwards before the crash.]

I wonder whether anyone has tried using git in a similar scenario. Is
git capable of handling this kind of data? And, are there any settings
and/or command line options that I should use? I had a quick look of
git help push (and pull/fetch) but cannot see anything obvious.

BTW, I am using git version 1.7.0.4 on the ubuntu server, and version
1.7.2.3 for cygwin on the client side.

Thanks in advance.

Qingning