git push Out of memory, malloc failed

I am trying to push my changes remotely to GitHub, every so often git fails due to

C:\dev\projects>git push -v
Pushing to https://[email protected]/mycompany/My-Project.git
Password for 'github.com':
fatal: Out of memory, malloc failed (tried to allocate 524288000 bytes)
fatal: write error: Invalid argument

This is very, very aggravating. I have run the following commands, upgraded git (which wiped out my settings and caused lots of pain, but I digress)

git gc --auto --prune=today --aggressive
git repack

I have even bumped the value of

http.postbuffer

but eventually it will fail again.

This is a typical Rails 3.1 application, total project size on disk is 9.69 MB.

My advice is to try several git parameters related with pack:

[pack]
   threads = 1
   deltaCacheSize = 128m
   windowMemory = 50m

What it got better results for me was setting git config pack.threads 1 and git config pack.windowMemory 50m (default is 10m).

Still, my host didn't have enough RAM memory (2GB) and kept failing. I hard copied the repo and moved it to another machine with more RAM (8GB). It got better but still failed.

Finally, I downloaded the latest version of git (https://github.com/git/git), compile it and install it. That fixed the problem just by running git repack -adf with the same parameters. After that I run git gc --aggressive --prune=now

Once I got the repo fixed in my local machine I pushed it to master, overwriting the remote repo, git push -f origin master.

To prevent similar errors in the future try not to add unnecessary large files to the repo (in my case I got a SQL dump of 3.5GB :)) and disable delta compression for large files (such as images, PDFs, videos). Add the following lines to .gitattributes:

*.pdf -delta
*.jpg -delta

You could try changing the config for repack with

git config --global pack.windowMemory 256m