Re: Large repo and pack.packsizelimit

[Nicolas Pitre <nico@fluxnic.net>]

On Tue, 8 May 2012, Jeff King wrote:

> On Thu, May 03, 2012 at 01:57:58PM +0200, th.acker66@arcor.de wrote:
> 
> > I am using MSysgit 1.7.9 on WinXP 32bit and have a very large repo
> > (10GB in .git; 20GB in source tree).  I had to set
> > pack.packsizelimit=1024MB to prevent "out of memory" during repacking
> > in git-gc and everything seemed to work fine.
> > 
> > When I tried to clone this repo an "out of memory" occured because the
> > packs to be transferred by the git protocol are not limited by
> > pack.packsizelimit.
> 
> Yes, pack-objects respects pack.packsizelimit when creating local packs,
> but incoming packs from the network (which are processed by index-pack)
> are not split.
> 
> This should be fixed in git. Unfortunately, I don't know that it is as
> trivial as just splitting the incoming stream; we would also have to
> make sure that there were no cross-pack deltas in the result.

IMHO this is the wrong fix.  The pack size limit was created to deal 
with storage media with limited capacity.  In this case, the repack 
process should be told to limit its memory usage, and pack-index should 
simply be taught to cope.


Nicolas