Re: Move to git is imminent - awaiting Stefan's approval

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 23:27:22 -0700
> From: Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com>
> 
> Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > And now I understand why git ran out of memory on Windows XP: the
> > memory footprint of git-pack-objects goes up to 3GB, whereas Windows
> > XP has only 3GB address space for all the applications.
> 
> Three hours and 3G of memory for this one repack!

It was only 1 hour in my case (I guess Angelo has a slower machine).

Also, limiting the number of threads to 2 or even 1 radically lowers
the required memory usage.

But that doesn't mean you need necessarily run "gc --agressive",
please listen to Andreas on this matter.

> I have a couple of questions if someone already has the clone
> available for a test.  Does a clone from the agressively repacked to
> 327M repository remain similarly compacted when cloned again from it?

It grows slowly after that.  E.g., in the 3 days since then it grew by
12MB.  I don't know whether this will level out later, a few days is
not enough to tell.

> If an agressively repacked repository is again repacked but this time
> without the --agressive option does the size stay around 327M or does
> it get expanded on the subsequent pass?

No, it doesn't expand, at least not on my system.  In fact, "git gc"
just slashed the storage by 10MB out of 12MB that it gained since I
ran "gc --agressive".

Again, this is just to give you some numbers, I don't want to suggest
what should be done on Savannah.