Excessive memory consumption.

I'm working with a repository containing a large number of revisions (it
has the full 2.6 kernel history) along with a bunch of large tarfiles of
prebuilt images (basically firmware images).  These tarfiles are about 50MB
and are updated frequently.

I'm trying to figure out how to limit memory consumption when fetching from
this repo.  The repo lives on a network drive, and during the

   "remote: Compressing objects: ..."

phase, git-pack-objects quickly grows to 3 or more GB in size.  I've tried
setting  pack.windowMemory = 512m, and pack.deltaCacheLimit = 512m.  Any
other suggested things to try?

This is running 1.5.4.3.

Thanks,
David