git-clone memory allocation error

Question

I'm trying to run git clone and am receiving the following error:

fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed
fatal: index-pack died with error code 128
fetch-pack from 'user@server:git' failed.

I was able to successfully do a clone on my local machine, but it's failing when I try to clone to another server.

Still somewhat new to this whole git thing, so any help would be greatly appreciated. :)

Solution 1

Do you have big files in your repository (like log files for example) ?
Apparently, your repository is too big to be retrieved on your hard drive.

There are two things you can do :

• Check for big files and remove them if they're not useful (not only by committing. But also by modifying your history. If you still have your big files in our repository, it won't be smaller.
• Do a "git gc". It'll automatically cleanup unused files and compress the repository.

Solution 2

If git on the remote machine fails due to memory constraints you might also try rsync or scp to copy the repository to your local machine and continue with cloning from there.

Comments

[Emil Sit]

git creates a new pack for each clone, containing the relevant objects for the cloner; so, I don't think git gc will help.

[nevan]

Yeah, we overlooked a large file (in this case a zip archive) that seemed to be causing the problem. That link about modifying the history was a big help. Thanks for that.

[Paul]

how do you do this on a remote branch?

[Damien MATHIEU]

You can't manipulate a remote branch without getting it locally.

[SinisterRainbow]

git gc also causes this error for me (fatal: Out of memory, calloc failed)

[ericbowden]

git gc caused the same error for me until I actually deleted .git and reinitialized. Has something to do with the commit history.