Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > pack-objects could be a big memory hog especially on large repos, > everybody knows that. The suggestion to stick a .keep file on the > largest pack to avoid this problem is also known for a long time. Yup, but not that it is not "largest" per-se. The thing being large is a mere consequence that it is the base pack that holds the bulk of older parts of the history (e.g. the one that you obtained via the initial clone). > Let's do the suggestion automatically instead of waiting for people to > come to Git mailing list and get the advice. When a certain condition > is met, gc --auto create a .keep file temporary before repack is run, > then remove it afterward. > > gc --auto does this based on an estimation of pack-objects memory > usage and whether that fits in one third of system memory (the > assumption here is for desktop environment where there are many other > applications running). > > Since the estimation may be inaccurate and that 1/3 threshold is > arbitrary, give the user a finer control over this mechanism as well: > if the largest pack is larger than gc.bigPackThreshold, it's kept. If this is a transient mechanism during a single gc session, it would be far more preferrable if we can find a way to do this without actually having a .keep file on the filesystem.
