Bazaar: Out of memory

[Ian Clatworthy]

Guido Ostkamp wrote:
> Hello again,
> 
> On Tue, 6 May 2008, Guido Ostkamp wrote:
>> I tried to continue conversion of a Git repository to Bazaar with
>> BzrFastImport when Bazaar crashed with the fatal error stated below.
> 
> unfortunately I have not received a reply to my earlier email yet with
> subject 'BzrFastImport / Bazaar fatal error'.

Guido,

Sorry for the delay - I hope to look into it today.

> It appears that Bazaar seems to have stability problems with large
> number of files, large file size or large size of repository. I checked
> out the bug reporting system and found quite a number of yet unsolved
> out-of-memory problems.

I recently converted the OpenOffice.org repository - 100K files, 305K
revisions - to Bazaar using fastimport so I know it can handle
converting big projects. The only problems I know of relate to large
files, not large numbers of files or large repositories. The latter can
have performance issues at times but shouldn't be causing any
out-of-memory errors.

> The largest files in the working tree of the Git repository I try to
> convert have a size of just ~40 MB and the system has 1.5 GB RAM and
> plenty of swapspace configured, thus there should not be any problem
> here. Both Mercurial and Git have absolutely no problem to deal with that.

Thanks for this information. IIRC, the problem you're seeing is in the
bzr-fastimport plugin code, not Bazaar itself. I'm pretty sure the
problem will be the large file. I'll dig further today and get you a fix
soon.

Ian C.