Why does Git.pm on cygwin complain about 'Out of memory during "large" request?

Question

I'm getting this error while doing a git svn rebase in cygwin

Out of memory during "large" request for 268439552 bytes, total sbrk() is 140652544 bytes at /usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/Git.pm line 898, <GEN1> line 3.

268439552 is 256MB. Cygwin's maxium memory size is set to 1024MB so I'm guessing that it has a different maximum memory size for perl?

How can I increase the maximum memory size that perl programs can use?

update: This is where the error occurs (in Git.pm):

 while (1) {
      my $bytesLeft = $size - $bytesRead;
      last unless $bytesLeft;

      my $bytesToRead = $bytesLeft < 1024 ? $bytesLeft : 1024;
      my $read = read($in, $blob, $bytesToRead, $bytesRead); //line 898
      unless (defined($read)) {
         $self->_close_cat_blob();
         throw Error::Simple("in pipe went bad");
      }

      $bytesRead += $read;
   }

I've added a print before line 898 to print out $bytesToRead and $bytesRead and the result was 1024 for $bytesToRead, and 134220800 for $bytesRead, so it's reading 1024 bytes at a time and it has already read 128MB. Perl's 'read' function must be out of memory and is trying to request for double it's memory size...is there a way to specify how much memory to request? or is that implementation dependent?

UPDATE2: While testing memory allocation in cygwin: This C program's output was 1536MB

int main() {
   unsigned int bit=0x40000000, sum=0;
   char *x;

   while (bit > 4096) {
      x = malloc(bit);
      if (x)
         sum += bit;
      bit >>= 1;
   }
   printf("%08x bytes (%.1fMb)\n", sum, sum/1024.0/1024.0);
   return 0;
}

While this perl program crashed if the file size is greater than 384MB (but succeeded if the file size was less).

open(F, "<400") or die("can't read\n");
$size = -s "400";

$read = read(F, $s, $size);

The error is similar

Out of memory during "large" request for 536875008 bytes, total sbrk() is 217088 bytes at mem.pl line 6.

Are you sure that Cygwin cofiguration is the issue here? Msys git comes with its own msys perl (typically C:\Program Files\Git\bin\perl.exe). I'm not sure what happens under Cygwin, but under win32 console use, msysgit uses its perl instead of the other perls on my system. — daotoad
Ah yes you're right, but my perl memory test uses cygwin's version of perl and it has this problem as well — Charles Ma

Matthew Farwell Matthew Farwell · Accepted Answer · 2011-09-28T12:35:46

This is a problem that has been solved in the latest version of msysgit by Gregor Uhlenheuer. There is a patch available. The problem is that in Git.pm, the file is read in one go. The solution is to read it in small chunks. I'm not sure if the fix has made it into any released versions, but the fix is easy to apply locally.

You need to change C:\Program Files\Git\lib\perl5\site_perl\Git.pm (about 8 lines change). Make sure you back it up first.

For the details of what to do, see Git.pm: Use stream-like writing in cat_blob().

The original discussion is Problems with larger files "Out of memory".

Why does Git.pm on cygwin complain about 'Out of memory during "large" request?

4 Answers