Git push - suboptimal pack - out of memory

Question

I could really use some help here.

I just created a new bare repo to act as a production target for dev pushes. I also have the working web directory on the server as a git repo. The server is running git 1.7.4.1 on centos5.5

After creating the new repo in the web directory, I performed a git add . It tallied up something like 2300 & some odd files & over 230k insertions.

I did a commit of the newly added file base. Went nice and clean. When I did a git push origin master though, it keeps giving me this (please note, I have 8 CPUs, hence the 8 threads. docs say this is normal);

# git push --mirror
Counting objects: 2000, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
warning: suboptimal pack - out of memory
fatal: inflateInit: out of memory (no message)
error: failed to push some refs to '/home/ggadmin/gg-prod.git'

I have tried the following things to resolve this, but all yield the same results;

git repack -adf --window-memory=100m
                                ^ tried running this up to 1024m. Same result.

Even tried a force push, but got the same thing, only with a malloc error;

# git push -f origin master
Counting objects: 2000, done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads.
warning: suboptimal pack - out of memory
fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed (tried to allocate 2340 bytes)
error: failed to push some refs to '/home/ggadmin/gg-prod.git'

I've been working on this for 2 days now and tried just about everything I can find on google and here on SO.

I have reached my wits end with trying to get this fixed. Please tell me that someone out there knows what can be done to make this work?

Answer 1

1. May be git is suboptimal tool for handling large amount of big blobs.
2. You can disable multi-threaded compression to save memory: git config pack.threads 1 (in addition to other memory limiting options, like core.bigfilethreshold in newer Git)

Answer 2

The following command fixed the issue for me:

git config --global pack.windowMemory 256m

This affects effectiveness of delta compression so you might want to try a bigger size first, something like 1g, depending on your hardware and bandwidth.

More details here: https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-pack-objects.html

Answer 3

git config --global pack.threads 1