Git Gc: No Space Left on Device, Even Though 3Gb Available and Tmp_Pack Only 16Mb

git gc: no space left on device, even though 3GB available and tmp_pack only 16MB

I had an instance of this problem. I was able to free up a considerable amount of disk space, but of course, that didn't solve the problem of what to do about the .tmp-* files. I ran git fsck and the Git repository wasn't damaged in that way.

I did the conventional pack-and-garbage-collect operations

git repack -Ad
git prune

but that didn't remove the .tmp-* files, though it would have ensured that all of the necessary objects were in the standard pack-* files if they needed to be copied from transient files left over from the crashed Git processes in the past.

Eventually I realized that I could safely move the .tmp-* files to a scratch directory, then run git fsck to see if what remained in the .git directory was complete. It turned out that it was, so I deleted the scratch directory and the files it contained. If git fsck had reported problems, I could have moved the .tmp-* files back into the .git directory and researched another solution.

Git Garbage collection doesnt seem to fully work

C:\Users\VonC\prog\git\git>git log -Ssize-garbage|more

This show the size-garbage output has been introduced in commit 1a20dd4 by Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy (pclouds) for git 1.8.3 (May 2013)

size-garbage: disk space consumed by garbage files, in KiB

count-objects: report how much disk space taken by garbage files

Also issue warnings on loose garbages instead of errors as a result of
using report_garbage() function in count_objects()

This garbage cleaning tip section mentions:

To bring the repo size down the bare minimum, you need both the following commands (neither command by itself does the whole job).

Also Note the lowercase "a" on the "repack", which says you want to blindly discard unreachable objects instead of keeping them as loose objects.

git repack -adf     # kills in-pack garbage
git prune           # kills loose garbage

So try again the git count-objects -v -H after applying both commands.

Looking at the git repack man page, jthill adds in the comments:

I prefer the big-A option:

"Same as -a, unless -d is used.

Then any unreachable objects in a previous pack become loose, unpacked objects, instead of being left in the old pack."

Linus Torvalds argues that -f like gc's --aggressive is much overused -- so much so he suggested yanking the documentation for it.

(in 2007)

(-f is for --no-reuse-delta)

That means a more efficient combination might be:

git repack -Ad      # kills in-pack garbage
git prune           # kills loose garbage

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