limit memory usage on large repositories

Hi there,

I've been using git for some time now, and host my remote bare repositories on my shared hosting account at Dreamhost.com. As a protective feature on their shared host setup, they enact a policy that kills processes that consume too much memory. This happens to git sometimes.

By "sometimes" I mean on large repos (>~500MB), when performing operations like git gc and git fsck and, most annoyingly, when doing a clone. It seems to happen in the pack phase, but I can't be sure exactly.

I've messed around with the config options like pack.threads and pack.sizeLimit, and basically anything on the git config manpage that mentions memory. I limit all of these things to 1 or 0 or 1m when applicable, just to be sure. To be honest, I really don't know what I'm doing ;)

Oddly enough, I'm having trouble reproducing my issue with anything but git fsck. Clones were failing in the past, but after a successful git gc, everything seems to be ok(?)

Anyway, I'd like some advice on what settings limit memory usage, and exactly how to determine what the memory usage will be with certain values.

Thanks!