"out of memory - terminating application" error when performing an svn merge

Question

We are seeing the following error when trying to perform a command-line svn merge with Subversion 1.6.9 under 32 bit Windows XP.

Out of memory - terminating application.

This application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way. Please contact the application's support team for more information.

Inspecting Windows task manager around this time reveals the following memory usage

The peak memory usage of the svn.exe process is in excess of 1.8GB.

As an aside, we get the same result when trying to perform the merge using TortoiseSVN.

We are trying to perform the merge from the root level of our repository. The total file size (on a developer machine) of the repository is around 3GB.

This is the first time that we are attempting a root-level merge. Are we hitting an internal svn limit?

Edit

After some trial-and-error investigation I've found that this problem seems to be caused by one specific folder in our repository. This folder contains 1,500 SQL scripts. Performing a merge on just this folder results in the same out of memory error (although it takes longer to blow up).

Answer 1

We were able to fix this issue, though we still don't understand the precise nature of the cause.

As stated in my post Edit, we tracked the issue to a single folder that contained around 1500 SQL scripts. This folder also had an svn:externals of a single file.

We performed the following steps:

• deleted this svn:externals and did an svn commit
• deleted the working copy of the folder (there seems to be an issue whereby if you remove an svn:externals property that referenced a single file that the file that was external'd into the folder does not get removed on a subsequent svn update)
• performed an svn update

When we next attempted an svn merge the command completed successfully.