Re: pack operation is thrashing my server

On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Ken Pratt wrote:

quoted

As for how to estimate entropy, isn't that just a matter of feeding it
through zlib and compare the output size to the input size? Especially
if we're already about to feed it through zlib anyway... In other
words, feed (an initial part of) the data through zlib, and if the
compression ratio so far looks good, keep going and write out the
compressed object, otherwise abort zlib and write out the original
object with compression level 0.

This is probably off topic now, but as the OP, I'd like to mention
that I tried setting pack.compression = 0 and it did not solve my
memory issues.

Yeah, the compression level is a tengential issue which has to do with 
speed.

So it seems to be that the packing itself that is
sucking up all the memory -- not the compression.

Initial packing requires enough memory.  And if your repository is not 
packed, then every clone request will act just like a first packing. So 
for git on a server to behave well, repositories have to be well packed.


Nicolas