Out of Memory a bridge too far

[Martin Pool]

> Out of curiosity what would an acceptable solution for this sort of
> thing look like to the Bazaar development team?  I don't really want to
> switch to anything else, and so I can't help but be curious as to what
> it would take to make bzr work with large files.

There are two main things you can do:

One is to make and publish a 64-bit Windows Python build.  Just
getting a 2.4.3 would be great, so you don't need to commit to doing
it for every release though of course that would be nice.  This
doesn't need any particular Python skills, just a certain amount of
work to go through the manual environment setup and then the automated
scripts that are in bzr-windows-installers.  If you start on this and
run into errors or confusion I'm sure people would be happy to help.
That should at least let Bazaar use all of the memory on your machine
rather than being limited to ~2GB or maybe less.

I can really understand your frustration when it runs out of memory,
but I find it a bit frustrating people complain about this but won't
step up to make a Windows 64 bit build.

The other avenue is to actually just fix things that do use more
memory than they should.  To do this you typically need to run bzr
with -Dmem_profile, run a command, look into where it's using memory,
and basically fix it.  With this too, if you show interest at least to
getting a dump and saying "what do I do now?" people will help you
with it.  John did a lot of work on this in 2.4 (and as it happens
I've just been deploying that into Launchpad through
<http://blog.launchpad.net/general/daily-builds-huge-trees>.)  He has
a worked example of how to use the Meliae profiler in
<http://jam-bazaar.blogspot.com/2010/08/step-by-step-meliae.html>.

The other thing Liam mentioned is to warn people before they commit
large files, so they don't get into this sticky situation, and Shannon
Weyrick recently contributed a patch to do that in
<https://code.launchpad.net/~weyrick/bzr/54624-warn-on-large-files/+merge/70691>.

m